Hi all,

You might have noticed some changes in the last few months to the site and the content - specifically that some posts go up with passwords on them initially and I want to explain why this is. I’ve decided to start a Patreon and also accept donations from anyone who is willing to “toss a coin to your Tech-Witcher”. One of the rewards to anyone who becomes a patron (at any level) is early access to articles on the site and videos on my new tech focussed YouTube channel.

I’m facilitating this by temporarily password protecting new posts for a few days. If you aren’t aware of Patreon, it’s a membership site where you can become a patron of creators and support them financially for the work that they do. My Patreon page currently has two tiers - the lowest one is $2/month and for that you will receive early access to content, exclusive posts, along with your name in the credits of my videos and on the site. The reason for this change is not that I’ve simply gotten greedy. I used to have a full-time sys admin job that I was very proud of and it paid well enough for my desired standard of living. Unfortunately, I no longer have that job and additionally I had some mental health problems. If you take nothing else away from this post, I’d like you to take away that IT workers need to take care of themselves just as much as anyone else. We have a weird job and it isn’t appreciated by most. A lot is expected of us and burn out or “crunch” (as the video game industry calls it) is very real - self-inflicted or otherwise. Even well-meaning managers and co-workers sometimes, inadvertently put impossible expectations on you. You owe it to yourself and the people who care about you as a person, to take care of yourself. I think it’s also important not to tie your career to your own sense of self-worth.

In short, last year wasn’t a good one for me. I lost a lot of good stuff and have had to give myself a hard reset. I care about the work I’ve done on this site for the past 4 years and I want to continue to do it. To pull the curtain back a little, I’m fortunate that this site gets a lot of traffic. On a bad day I get hundreds of unique visitors, and this is based on last year’s statistics which was my “worst” year yet. It’s an unrealistic comparison but if I somehow got paid £1 per unique visitor last year, I’d have been paid a lot more than I did for my full-time job.

Looking ahead, I already have a road map laid out for future content. I’ll be writing more articles along with making videos for the YouTube channel. Future videos will have higher production values than the ones released in 2019. Additionally, I’m effectively a freelance worker now. If you’d like my services or want me to work with you on a project, please get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks so much for reading. As always if you have any questions, please leave a comment. Cheers.

-Mike