Howdy

About The Blog

This site is my personal journal. A place I can shout into the void. There’s no fixed category and I’m not here to make money or sell anything. My posts can be about work, life, technology, social issues, sometimes a bit of politics, anything really.

Think of it like a personal social media account.

About Me

  • Born ’73 so I’m GenX Prime. Analog childhood, digital adulthood. The last generation to properly care about music. Low tolerance for both boomer’s and millennial’s shite.
  • American by birth, Texan by the grace of the gods, British by choice.
  • My trade, occupation, and obsession. I design and build the internal tech platform that developers use to test and deploy software systems, and also the tools, systems, and infrastructure that make it easy for teams to run, observe, and scale applications.
  • DevSecOps is the how and why of what I do. I’m the bridge between the development, security, and operational teams. I build infrastructure with code, automate the way application software is developed, tested, and deployed - all while baking security into every step. I’m the expert who keeps the factory running smoothly, fast, reliable, and locked down against threats.
  • I design the digital foundations companies run on. Instead of physical servers and networks, I plan and build the systems in the cloud that let software run reliably, securely, and efficiently. Think of me like an architect for the internet side of a business - making sure everything fits together, stays up, scales when needed, and doesn’t cost a fortune.
  • I’m both a Trustee and Webmaster for The Druid Network, a registerd charity in England and Wales.
  • Married for over 30 years to my best friend and partner in crime.
  • I raised two daughters. They’re pushing or beyond their 30s now and I thought my job would be done - but it never is - and I’d have it no other way.
  • My first computer was a Commodore 64. I’ve coded in BASIC, Pascal, C, Perl, PHP, Python, Go, half a million Shell Scripts, and a few others. I’ve administered Unix, Linux, Windows, and MacOS systems. I’ve built networks, servers, databases, and applications. I’ve been a sysadmin, DBA, developer, release engineer, DevSecOps engineer, platform engineer, and cloud architect. I currently have a home lab built from ethernet powered Raspberry Pi’s.
  • Senior Airman Chris Funderburg spent 1 tour of duty as an Aircraft Armament Systems Specialist and had the time of his life in the US Air Force. I loaded bombs and missiles on F-111s, the same plus a cannon on F-16s, and learned important life lessons like - how to not mix my drinks, how many shots bad whiskey it takes to black out whist standing up, and why it’s a bad idea to set fire to your sombrero whist you’re wearing it. Thank the gods that phones didn’t have cameras back then.
  • I have a BSc in Environmental Management and Technology from The Open University. I care about the planet, sustainability, and doing my bit.
  • I have an allotment where I grow vegetables, fruits, and flowers. I can grow tomatoes like nobody’s business.
  • Is it a religion? A spirituality? I dunno. I do know I’m an animist - and I strive to practice honourable relationships with the natural world.
  • My first game console was an Atari 2600, and I’ve owned every Nintendo console since the NES, and every PlayStation since the PS2. I built my own liquid cooled gaming PC. And, I own the D&D Rule Book. Just need to play a campaign and the circle’s complete.
  • Order when needed, chaos when useful.

Those labels explain pretty much everything important about me aside from my political views - which is a whole other set of labels.

In more detail, I’m a Texan living in the UK and working in the IT industry for nearly 30 years. I currently run my own company as a consultant cloud architect and DevSecOps engineer and I specialise in helping companies build enterprise grade solutions using AWS, Google, and Azure public clouds; using infrastructure-as-code; and other DevSecOps practices.

If you want to learn more about my professional experience, check out my LinkedIn profile.

In my time I’ve worked at Burger King, washed oil rigs, been an auto mechanic, loaded bombs, missiles, and canons of US Air Force F-111s and F-16s, been a development engineer using Informix 4GL, then as a database administrator, then as systems administrator responsible for entire enterprises, before finally finding my niche as a Linux-based release engineer / architect. In the last few years I’ve been heavily involved in DevSecOps methodologies, Cloud based environments, and Platform Engineering.

Outside work, among other things, I’m an allotment gardener, and in 2020, after quite a few years of study with The Open University, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Management and Technology.

I also volunteer as: a trustee and webmaster of The Druid Network - a registered charity in English and Wales.

This Web Site’s Tech

Earlier last year I rebuilt both my AWS EC2 servers into this common containerised platform running in a single Spot instance. For anyone interested, I’ll do a more in depth explanation when I build my Cloud Cauldron blog - but it basically looks like this:

  • A dedicated VPC, and AWS EC2 instance spun up with (OpenTofu) Terraform, running a Debian Stable AMI but encrypted.

  • A root volume that’s small and remains mostly untouched. Only enough changes to the root volume to enable it to reboot without needing any configuration changes.

  • An all-important persistent data and configuration lives on a separate encrypted volume mounted at /volume. This gets backed up via a snapshot from AWS Data Lifecycle Manager.

  • I’ve open sourced all the OpenTofu Terraform to create it all here.

  • Everything important is running as a Docker container via Docker Compose. There are 5 major Docker containers that need to remain up:

    • certbot: Mostly sleeping for 12 hours at a time but then checking for certs that need to be renewed
    • nginx: Powers all the static and tool sites.
    • php: Has the same mounts as nginx and runs any PHP needed
    • mariadb: Powers any needed mysql/mariadb databases.
    • gitea: powers Gitea separately. nginx reverse proxies it.

  • All Powering These Sites:

    • A Wordpress site powering a personal archive. (nginx and php)
    • bocan.dev - A 1 page CV site. (just nginx)
    • cfunder.me - A personal URL shortener. (nginx and php)
    • My personal blog (nginx and hugo), and tooling hidden underneath:
    • My business site (just nginx) - but soon to be my business blog (nginx and hugo)
    • My family tree site (just nginx)

  • There are 3 crontab jobs executing commands inside the docker containers:

    • Every 15 minutes, exec into php and update my TTRSS site to get check RSS feeds.
    • Every 31 minutes, exec into php and run the Nextcloud cron processing.
    • Every 5 minutes, use Git to pull all configuration from GitHub, then exec into the Hugo container and generate the static blogs.

  • Issues I still need to fix:

    • The Git repo with all the content, also stores the web certificates so I can’t make it public.

Know, O Prince

that between the years when the oceans drank Microsoft DOS and the gleaming Windows, and the rise of “The Cloud”, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining servers lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars - Debian, FreeBSD, Slackware, AIX, Solaris with its dark-haired sales women and server towers of spider-haunted mystery, SuSE with its chivalry, Caldera that bordered the pastoral lands of SCO, OpenBSD with its shadow-guarded passwords, RedHat whose Sys Admins wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Apple, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Chris the Texan, little-haired, sullen-eyed, MacBook in hand, a builder, a programmer, a sys-admin, a devops engineer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jewelled server rooms of the earth under his sandled feet."

– By tradition, this has been on every home page I’ve ever had