August 8 2022
I’ve had a blog before. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, should you know the right term to search for, you’ll find years of my teenage musings. They were mostly nonsensical to be blunt, and by the time I started “figuring it all out” in college, I had enough sense to remove those things from the public eye (though by no means did I “figure it all out”).
This is different. I’m now established, and I actually have valuable things to talk about. So this site will serve as a repository of my thoughts on the state of the identity and access management space, as well as handy tips for Shibboleth, CAS, docker, etc. All those fun things I deal with on a day-to-day-basis.
This is also somewhat of a learning experience. I own two domains kellenmurphy.com and kellenmurphy.dev. To start, I’ll be pointing both domains to this site, hosted using Github Pages and built with Jekyll. I’ve chosen that platform because I’m tired of running an EC2 instance just to host some basic stuff… stuff that I never actually managed to really get in place because I spent more time playing around with my AWS instance and dev-y things. It would be more valuable, IMHO, to actually create some content and get that into something… rather than waiting until I had something pretty created in order to share content.
Ultimately, what you see now will only exist on kellenmurphy.com, and kellenmurphy.dev will be used principally to showcase some dev projects I’ve created over the years that I’ll be sharing. I’m not ready to go full-tilt into sharing projects, yet, however.
Well, for starters, probably a lot of miscellaneous useful information about Shibboleth, both SP and IDP. For the last six years I’ve been working extensively in the Shibboleth consulting world, and I come across useful tidbits that I’d love to “get out there”, but which don’t generally rise to the status of worthy of writing a blog post for my current employer. That said, I feel like it’s important to get that information out there.
I’ve also grown over the last 2-3 years from “just another bloke that knows Shib” to “just another bloke who has consulted extensively with every major single sign-on product, stack, SaaS, or IDaaS there is.” What that means is – as with Shibboleth – I’ve accumulated a wealth of knowledge that I’m keen on sharing. Some of that sharing doesn’t warrant some long, drawn-out, SEO optimized pseudo-fluff for the company page.
And lastly, through my experiences for the last few years, I’ve come to develop opinions on the single sign-on / identity and access management industry which I’d like to share. Hence, it’s worth now noting in large, centered text:
Hope that clears that up!
Yes, I have some personal side-projects that are under development, as I alluded to previously. Those will be here. There may be personal things shared from time to time. There likely will be memes. There will be code. There almost certainly will be refactors of the style and design. There may be whole-hog architectural changes. I may obliterate this thing when I feel like it, or not post often, or post a lot…
I really don’t know.
I simply felt like it was worth sharing some of my SSO and IAM knowledge within a personal space.