Why Write a blog?

Document the projects that I spend time on.
I spend a lot of time messin’ with tech, most of my life, in fact. Often, I get torn away from something that has taken my interest for a few weeks/days/hours by real life, and when someone asks me to explain what I was doing, I find it hard to explain. ‘I was trying to recompile my kernal’ or ‘I was learning about DHCP in completely unstructured way’ – these seem like terse descriptions for activities that have consumed many hours of my life. So, it seemed like a good idea to wrap up these personal trips into the ‘techy’ depths with some sort of document or artifact.

Write something.
I actually really enjoy writing. I’m not terribly good at it, but I find make incremental improvements if I actually practice. I find it’s like stretching a muscle that hasn’t been used in while. I like the groove I get into when I write. I like that I produce something. I like wrestling with ideas in my head that don’t want to come out neatly as words. Again, I’m not good at it – this is not award winning prose, but I enjoy it.

Get stuff out of my head
I suffer from head clutter. I have ideas. Lots of ideas. A great many of those ideas of self indulgent projects that my very patient wife has absolutely zero interest in. Usually I keep them to myself, and I land up mulling over them until she had to lean over to me and say ‘SAY SOMETHING!!’ So part of what this blog is a outpouring of what’s in my head. All the noise that’s not work or family related needs to come out here, leaving space for work and family in my head. Seems like an odd idea, but I think it works.

Keep notes
I really really hate having to do things more than once. As a died in the wool devops’er, if something needs to be done more than once, I pull up the handbrake, crack my knuckles and start automatin’. In the case of my small home network, often it’s small things that just need to be remembered e.g. How to make timecapsule backups run faster. I never remember the arcane symbols that OSX requires to make that happen. So they go here.