After my little side trip down Hyper-V Manager configuration errors I’m ready to finish setting up in Hyper-V. From Windows Admin Center I create a 300GB drive partition to get me started with setting up some virtual machines. I set Hyper-V’s default disk and VM paths to this drive. I then set up a few virtual switches. That will do it I am ready to set up some virtual machines and have some fun!

So I’ve probably gone overboard with this thing but I’m OK with that. I do not want to be in a situation where I’m in the middle of an exciting project to realize I lack the resources to move forward. That will just kill my buzz and stop me in my tracks. There are some softwares that I have come across in the past year that looked interesting to me and I would like to learn more about them. These include Pi-Hole, NextCloud, Dakboard, Bookstack, The Open Endpoint Manager, Monica, Cloudflare Tunnel, Certbot, and Home Assistant.

Beyond just looking at random software to play with I would like to try and boost my knowledge base in Linux, automation, infrastructure as code, and to gain a better understanding of devops standard practices and common tools. My Linux skills are rusty at best right now. I may have been running Slackware 4 and 7 servers back in the day but that was so long ago how much of it do I actually remember at this point? Heck, how much of what I can remember is still relevant? Sure I’ve spun up an Ubuntu LAMP server since then but am I doing it well? Probably not.

I came across this cool Developer Roadmap website. While heavily focused on development that probably isn’t a bad thing for me to lean into and have some resources to reference. They also have a DevOps roadmap, and I think this is just great way to visualize and breakdown a process to go through learning thing you’ll need on a regular basis. They also have some useful guides and videos once you are moving through a roadmap.

The first three topics covered on the DevOps roadmap are “Learn a Programing Language,” “Understand Different OS Concepts,” and “Learn about Managing Servers.” So I’ve picked up a couple of Python books and I’ll start there with programming and automation.

Then I stumbled upon the Linux Up Skill Challenge on Reddit. How cool! This probably won’t cover everything in the roadmap for operating systems but it’s 20 lessons in a month and the start of the month is just around the corner so let’s give it a try!