Going All-In on Broadcom

As some of you will have noticed, after a few months doing something else, I have returned to the Payment Security team at Broadcom. It is wonderful to be back and it doesn't really feel like I ever left.

During my time out, I discovered that it's very rare to be able to contribute to solving problems that impact the everyday lives of millions of people. The Payment Security team lets me do just that and, to top it off, I have an amazingly dedicated group of colleagues around the world.

When my garden leave was drawing to a close, and my time for tinkering was running out, I switched my blog platform from Squarespace to a self-hosted instance of Ghost. Now, in the same way that my family is now fed by Broadcom, this blog is powered by a Broadcom CPU.

Hardware

The blog now runs on a £44 Raspberry Pi Model 4. For the price, this is a very capable computer (broadly on par with a regular desktop from 2012) and is more than up to the task of hosting this site.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation was created to promote the study of computer science and put the fun back into learning computing. The co-founder, and current Chair, of Raspberry Pi foundation, Eben Upton, works for Broadcom and given the charitable status was able to secure SoCs at preferential prices and the rest is history.

Software

While the default choice for many self-hosted blogs is Wordpress, it seems to be a very heavyweight option that is trying to be all things to all people. Given how I don't want to be a full time system admin, I wanted to choose a small, focussed blog engine which would largely look after itself.

The Ghost project was co-founded by a former core contributor to Wordpress who was becoming disillusioned with its lack of focus. This resonated with me and, from the popularity of the project on Github, it seems to resonate with many others.

It's installation was straight-forward, secure by default and will keep itself updated without any further involvement from me.

The default theme looks fine for my purposes but, the popularity of the platform is so high, that there are many third-party options also available.

Connectivity

While there are companies that host Raspberry Pis in data centres, they don't currently offer hosting of Model 4s and so this site was served from my home broadband connection.

Given the size of my current readership, that was likely to have been perfectly adequate but, as I like a challenge, I've configured Cloudflare as a CDN.

The Hard Part

Now the hard part really begins. As I have a robust platform to share my thoughts with the world, I need to commit to writing at a faster cadence than I have managed recently.

Wish me luck!