I enjoy writing documentations as I am “forced” to convert ideas into technical writing. Knowing these documentations will be consumed by other fellow engineers means I HAD to write in a maintainable and readable manner.
However, as an engineer who also has a homelab, I often struggle with writing documentation for my homelab. My homelab serves a single-digit number of users and there was only one maintainer - me, myself, and I. There wasn’t enough ROI to justify spending time writing any form of documentation for services I am running.
Recently, one of my media services stopped working properly. 10 minutes of troubleshooting points me to a DNS issue (it’s always DNS). 15 minutes to think and identify where in the network could have went wrong. And another 15 minutes to fix it.
I have always approached such technical issues in my homelab in a very adhoc, just-in-time manner. Although this approach has worked for me up to now, I realize it isn’t sustainable; as I often end up spending time on trivial details, like figuring out how I previously installed a piece of software, which creates avoidable toil.
Just yesterday, I had an epiphany about the tech blogs I had been consuming (such as the NetflixTechBlog). I have always viewed these technical blogs through the lens of the general public, since that’s who they’re meant for. These blogs, at first glance, seem to serve as a mechanism for knowledge sharing among the industry. But I’d argue that these blogs play a secondary yet important role - to serve as knowledge management & transfer among Netflix engineers. I reckon at least one junior Netflix engineer has read one of the blogs and went “ah… that’s how we overcame the challenges of misattributing IPs for workloads producing eBPF flow logs.”
With the goal of documenting additional context for my future self, combined with the benefits of sharing knowledge publicly, I’m beginning to appreciate the reasons for starting a personal blog. Adopting this perspective, I hope to write about a wide range of technical subjects - documentations, guides, thoughts and ideas. If you’ve happened to stumble across this blog, I hope it’s readable and that you might pick up even a small insight from it.