Most of the Azure and DevOps content online is tutorial-shaped: clean inputs, happy paths, things working as documented. This blog is for the other kind. The “the docs say X but the real behavior is Y” moments that only show up after you’ve already wasted an afternoon on them.
I’ll be writing here about Azure, DevOps, infrastructure as code, and cybersecurity. Also, occasionally, the kind of rabbit holes that have nothing to do with my job but are too interesting to ignore.
What you’ll find here
Roughly in order of likelihood:
- Real Azure war stories. Issues I’ve actually hit, with the workarounds that actually work
- AZ-400 study notes as I work through the cert
- The pfSense home-router build handling a gigabit line with full IDS/IPS inspection. The one I keep meaning to document
- LoRa radio + MeshCore, because off-grid mesh networking is its own delightful rabbit hole and I can’t stop thinking about it
- Whatever else seems worth writing down
How this blog is built (if you care)
Open source, Astro static site, deployed to Azure Static Web Apps from the
same monorepo as rlwilliamson.dev. Posts are plain markdown. Images run
through Astro’s <Image> component for automatic resize and WebP conversion.
Syntax highlighting via Shiki with Tokyo Night.
# typical post workflow
$ cd blog/src/content/posts
$ touch my-new-post.md
$ npm run dev # local preview
$ git commit && git push
# CI builds, copies dist to frontend/blog/, deploys to SWARSS is here if that’s your thing.