About this site
About
Who writes Municipal Tech Notes and why: a working municipal IT director sharing generalized, reusable lessons for small-org and government IT.
I'm Ryan Bertram. By day I run IT for a mid-size city in Michigan, which in a small shop means I am the help desk, the sysadmin, the security team, the developer, and the person who explains to a department head why the thing they want will take longer than they hoped.
This blog is where I write down what I learn doing that job. Not the polished, vendor-approved version, but the real one: the script that broke in a way the documentation never mentioned, the automation that saved a day a week, the security decision I had to make with imperfect information and a budget that did not care about my preferences.
What you'll find here
Practical, reusable material for people who run lean IT operations. Most posts are generalized from real work: PowerShell and Python automation, Microsoft 365 and Active Directory administration, small internal web apps, and civic technology. If you have ever been the entire IT department, you are the person I am writing for.
Why generalized, and why the caution
I work in the public sector, so I am careful. Every post is written so it helps you without exposing anything specific about the systems, data, or residents of any organization I work for. The patterns are real; the deployments are never named. That discipline is not an afterthought here, it is a rule I run every draft through before it publishes.
Get in touch
If a post helped, if you spotted a mistake, or if you want to talk through a problem in your own small or public-sector IT shop, I am easy to reach.