Welcome to fionnlinux.com — glad you found your way here. Whether you stumbled across this by accident or you’re on a similar journey yourself, I hope you find something useful here.
I’ve been planning this site for a few months now and have finally been able to make it happen. I’m aiming for one to two posts a month — nothing too ambitious, but enough to keep me honest and engaged with my learning. Hopefully this site holds me to that.
Reasons Behind The Site Build#
There are a few reasons I started this site and I’d like to share them all with you.
I’m working through the CompTIA certification pathway — ITF+ and A+ done, Network+ in progress, Security+ and RHCSA on the horizon. One of the best ways to reinforce learning is to document it. Through this process my goal is to understand the subject matter enough to be able to explain it clearly to somebody else. This is a vital skill in enterprise IT environments where you need to articulate clearly what is happening. This site is that test, applied publicly.
From the start I wanted to do things the correct way — building good habits before bad ones have a chance to form. It’s easier to learn something correctly the first time than to unlearn it later on down the line. That thinking shapes how I approach every certification, every homelab, and every post that I make on this site.
More Than Just Certifications#
Building this site has been as much a part of the learning as the certifications themselves. Hugo, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines — every time I push a change to GitHub the site builds and deploys automatically. That’s not just convenient, it’s intentional. CI/CD and version control with Git appear consistently across modern IT job postings and I’d rather learn them by doing something real and personal than follow a tutorial I’ll forget the next day. Everything here is built with open source tools, managed from the terminal, and documented as I go. That’s not just a preference — it’s part of the learning.
An Online CV That Actually Shows Something#
Certificates tell an employer what you know on paper. This site is my chance to show how I think, how I work, and what I am actually building toward. For someone pivoting into IT from a completely different field — which is exactly where I am — that matters.
My background is in electrical installation and manufacturing. Not a traditional IT entry point. This site is part of how I bridge that gap — demonstrating practical skills alongside the certifications, in public, where anyone can see the work.
Learning in Public#
I’ll get things wrong on here. That’s not something I’m trying to hide — it’s part of the process. If someone with more experience spots a mistake or a better way of doing something I’d genuinely welcome that. Learning in public means being open to being corrected, and I’d rather be corrected early than carry a bad habit forward.
If you’ve landed here because you’re also trying to pivot into IT from somewhere else entirely — this site is partly for you too. I’m not an expert documenting what I already know. I’m someone figuring it out and writing it down as I go.
That’s what fionnlinux.com is. A working journal, an online CV, and a small contribution back to the open source community that is helping me get where I want to go.