An IT consultant's (b)log

Welcome!

It seems that you have just found your way to my blog. As the title suggests, in this blog I’ll share things I come across in my daily work as an IT consultant in the Microsoft universe — especially the stuff I think is worth sharing.

Having my own tech blog is something I’ve thought about for a long time, but I never quite got around to starting it. I guess now was the time to finally make it happen! 😀

I’ve already got quite a long list of ideas to write about. Some topics that you’re most likely to find in this blog include:

• Automation / PowerShell / Serverless 🤖
• Device Management (e.g. Intune & Configuration Manager) 💻
• Identity Management in general 🆔
• Entra and Microsoft 365 💪
• Security 🕵️

Let’s see how often I’ll actually have time to update the blog!🤞

A look behind the scenes

This blog is hosted in GitHub Pages as static site generated with Jekyll. I stumbled upon GitHub Pages and Jekyll by accident, and was instantly drawn to it. It gave me just the push I needed to finally start writing a blog. Using this combination allows me to use X-as-Code approach to blogging: I can define my blog as code (Markdown to be exact) in GitHub repository with GitHub Actions building and publishing the site to GitHub Pages.

My current setup for writing the blog is as follows:

• Visual Studio Code with Dev containers extension
• Rancher Desktop installed on my Windows 11 laptop with WSL2 enabled
• Blog’s code including devcontainer.json in GitHub repository

By using Dev containers I can tell VS Code to clone the blog repository inside the container and have a full development environment automatically set-up including the capability to preview the blog locally as I edit it. When I’m ready, I simply commit the changes to the repository and GitHub Actions take care of publishing them.

This setup is also compatible with GitHub Codespaces which means that I could update the blog using a cloud dev box without having to install anything locally. GitHub personal accounts include GitHub Codespaces and it’s completely free to use (see limitations here)

About the author

I’m a senior IT consultant from Finland working with a wide range of (mostly Microsoft) technologies. If you wish to contact me, please see the About page.