Howdy is how I typically start my conversations. It can serve as a greeting as well as a somewhat icebreaker.

So… howdy! Ice broken yet?

Well, first things first, my name is André Nogueira and I’m an Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). If you are interested in my work history, my LinkedIn profile as well as my resume will be linked in the Contact page.

I’ve been an aficionado for all things tech since I can remember. From a very young age, I’ve been fascinated with games and consequently with computers. I’ve also been lucky enough to be exposed to a lot of creativity-related games, especially LEGO, which I believe helped me pioneer my problem-solving skills.

Assembling and disassembling things has always been a great interest of mine, and that’s exactly what ended up attracting me the most in the world of technology.

That curiosity and passion is still very much alive in me, the desire to know how things work, how they communicate with each other, how they can be automated, how they can be improved and how they can be secured have probably been the main driver that lead me to this path that I’m currently on, being a SRE.

Recently, I’ve began to feel the urge to share some of the knowledge that I’ve been gathering over the years, and that’s the main reason behind this blog. Not just about sharing, but also about constructing something, so I thought: Why not combine both and build something and share it with the world? That thought has been stuck in my mind for a while now, and, if you are reading this, it means I’ve finally decided to take the leap and start this journey.

You may be wonder the reason behind the name of this blog. If you aren’t, well… I’ll explain it anyway. I’m always curious about all the lore behind the things I’m interested in or I follow. Like I previously mentioned, this blog has been something that I’ve been thinking for a while now (won’t mention how long, but it’s been a while…) and one of the main reasons that made me take so long to start it was: what should I actually name it?

Naming anything is hard. If you are a fellow DevOps you might relate to that, and if you don’t relate to that, I envy you. So for some time I’ve been brainstorming a lot with my inner self a potential good name for this blog. I knew the kind of content I wanted to share (which was stuff about technology), but the actual content was still an uncertainty. As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy a variety of fields in technology, so I knew that the name would need to be something that could encompass as many of them as possible.

After spamming my girlfriend with potential names, as a joke she said: “Why not call it Tech Quests?“. At first I laughed it off, but it got stuck in my head and I realized it actually filled up all the criteria I had in mind. It was vague enough, it mentioned technology, it was somewhat catchy and had a nice ring to it. On top of it I though it was me, as in, it reflected my journey and the approach I typically take when learning and exploring new things. I tend to look at each task/project as a quest of sorts, kind of like a RPG game, where you have a main quest but also a bunch of side quests for you to explore. Here, there’s not really going to be a main quest, just a bunch of side quests, because the goal is not to reach a final place - a destination -, but to enjoy the journey as I explore, build and share all the things that I’ll be learning throughout.

“The journey is the reward” - Steve Jobs

With that being said, if you reach this point, I thank you for taking the time to read all of this, out of all the things that you could be doing right now, and I hope you enjoy the many side (tech) quests that we’ll be embarking on.