This site is basically my documentation site(as far as I am thinking).

Why ?

From a long time I was thinking of creating a documentation for my self, about what I was doing. Approximately since mid 2022 I am actively developing a Home Lab and exploring new things and experimenting new tech (Approximately coz I haven’t documented it).

A major problem I was facing during this time was, I encounter a problem and I solve it by googling, redditing, reading various blogs, articles and forums, after all this pleasureful headaches I solved problem, after some time while altering and tinkering I again face the same or similar issue, and I remember the approach but forget the actual command or config syntax for that, and while again hitting head with various sources, sometimes I couldn’t find that miraculous blog or command that solved problem with sneeze. To overcome this I was thinking for solutions.

At this time one of my cousin who is also in IT field, suggested me to start documenting things I do, this would help me reflect myself about what I do, and also help me when I want help from my previous struggles. He told me, that this would also help me showcase my work, skills and what I do, can also work as a portfolio.

How

After deciding to document things, Next question was how to start documenting and where. As initial steps I started in a notebook by creating an IP table of home network, creating network map of servers. After that I just stopped documenting as it was taking a long time and extra effort, the implementation I was doing in an hour while documenting It took 2-3 hrs.

After this initial attempt, I thought why note-pen approach in this digital era while working with the electronics, so I started exploring digital documentation methods. The methods I liked most were notion and markdown based notetaking apps. but this also didn’t last long.

And finally here I am approaching the markdown(obsidian) and static site generator(Hugo) approach, where I can publish what I document. Before coming to Hugo, I was first attracted by the Idea of static site generators, I experimented jekyll, that time following Techno Tim’s setup but at that time I was lost in the complexity. But recently Network chuck posted about this, and that video again made me start documenting and made the complex setup seem easy! Thanks chuck :)

The full workflow and my setup I will discuss in other post/article. as I have used different approach for hosting than chuck, I have self-hosted in my home. used github webhooks and some scripting invoke webhook to achieve that.

Real Challenge

The real challenge is to continue the journey started and stay consistent. Documenting even if it’s taking longer that usual.

One of the step is to reduce the friction to document as less as possible, for that currently I have used scripting.