Hello friends, welcome to the new blog! My name is Mark Wilkinson and I live in the small town of Garner, outside of Raleigh North Carolina. I live here with my wife, four children, dog, and seven chickens. I've been working in technology for over 15 years in one capacity or another. In my current role I lead a group of outstanding DBAs at a company called ChannelAdvisor in Morrisville.

I started this blog to focus more on me and what is happening in my life and less on SQL Server (like I do here: m82labs). While I do enjoy SQL Server and you will see some SQL Server posts here, I'll primarily be focussing on whatever I currently find interesting with a smattering of commentary on articles/books I've read. Currently I do a lot of professional work in PowerShell and a little bit of Python. In my personal life I use a lot of Python and Bash, some Go, and a little PowerShell. I've also taken to working on craft projects with my wife (what a great reason to buy new tools).

This blog runs on a static site generator I wrote in Python3 called Antiquity (that I don't plan on releasing) that attempts to output mostly plain text, responsive web pages. I've been using static site generators for a while, starting on Github pages and eventually moving to a Jekyll blog running in an S3 bucket. I wanted to write my own just to see how hard it was, and to see how light weight I could make it. My current setup is very similar to many others:

• Uses markdown for the post format
• Uses yaml frontmatter on each post to determine posting date, title, short link, and draft status
• Supports post "collections"
• Uses a custom templating system (just find/replace at this point)
• Supports code formatting via pygments

I hope you enjoy what you see here. I'm primarily trying to blog for myself with this blog, so you won't see any buttons to share my posts on social media, and you won't see anything trying to track you (if you do, PLEASE CONTACT ME!)