First Post: why starting a technical blog is hard
As a devops engineer I work with various tools and technologies everyday. Some of them I use everyday or almost everyday (AWS, Terraform, Git , Docker, etc. ) and some only rarely. If you need to use use something you only used a month or two ago chances are you will have to spend some time getting familiar with the tool again. This is where notes come very useful. If you have some notes about what you figured out when using the tool last time it would be much easier to figure out and remember what you did last time. In other for these notes to be useful couple of conditions have to be met in my opinion:
- There should be a single place for putting your notes.
- The notes should be easily searchable.
- The notes should be indexed for easily finding what you need.
These goals can be met by simply using almost any notes app. However, I\'ve been guilty of trying many different ways to organize my notes (org-mode, Google keep, oneNote, etc). I think that creating a static webpage where I can write my notes in Markdown and publish to the web would be ideal as it will solve these problems.
However, I first had an idea to create this kind of technical blog more than 3 years ago and I only started to write my first post now. Why is that?
Obstacles for starting a technical blog
Obstacles that prevented me from writing for so long were that there are so many ways to launch a blog these days that it was fatiguing for me to start. I wanted to write a specific technical content about the problem that I was currently working with. However, that required me to do many additional tasks:
- Choosing a technology for a blog. There are static site generators like: Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby, etc, also blogging platforms like wordpress and finally website builders to choose from.
- Then comes a time to pick a theme. There are thousands of themes available for various static site generators. Some of them are more or less configurable. You also need to learn about the configuration language and options. This also takes time.
- Final, but perhaps the most important point for most people. Is the fear that you have nothing interesting to write about. There are many technical blogs around and your blog probably won\'t standout or be read by many people.
Why start anyway
I decided to create blog anyway simple because I want to have a webpage for my own reference that would help me to remember some things I\'ve done and that I could have a reference in the future. However, personally I refer to technical bogs very often during my work and I think that some people might find some of the post useful if they run into similar problems in the future.
I chose to use Hugo for this blog because it allows me to write my posts in markdown which I'm familiar with and it was quite easy to setup.(I\'m not entirely happy with the theme but it will work for now, the content is more important)
What to expect in this blog
In this blog I will try to document working with various devops tools. A lot of other technical blogs assumes that reader is well informed about a specific topic. I will try to make posts in this blog suitable for everyone and explain concepts as simply as possible. Thanks for reading and I hope that someone will find something useful in this blog :)