I’ve been meaning to write more. Like most developers, I have a graveyard of half-finished blog posts in various note-taking apps, Google Docs, and plain text files scattered across my machines.
The Problem
I wear a lot of hats. Between my day job, a homelab that always needs attention, side projects that multiply faster than I can finish them, and the general chaos of life — my time is limited. Really limited.
Because of that, I tend to work on side projects in bursts. Something comes up at work that I don’t fully understand, or I hit a problem in my homelab that sends me down a rabbit hole. I’ll spend an evening or a weekend digging into it, learning just enough to solve the problem, maybe building something along the way. And then I move on to the next thing.
Every time I learned something interesting or built something cool, I’d think “I should write about this.” Then I’d spend three hours setting up a blog framework, get distracted by configuration options, and never actually write anything. The moment would pass, the details would fade, and all that learning would just… evaporate.
Writing it down
I keep re-learning things I already figured out. Debugging sessions that took hours, configuration tricks that saved a deployment, architectural decisions I’d love to remember the reasoning behind six months later — gone, because I didn’t write any of it down.
I already try to automate things with Ansible and Terraform, and that helps — but even those don’t run frequently enough that I always remember what I did or why. I’ll open a playbook I wrote six months ago and spend twenty minutes just trying to remember what problem it was solving. The code is there, but the context isn’t.
Turns out when you try to explain something, even to yourself, you find out pretty quickly where your understanding falls apart. That’s most of why I want to do this. The other part is just not wanting to solve the same problem twice because I forgot how I solved it the first time.
Not everything has to be cool
Not everything I make or learn is going to be interesting to someone else. That’s fine. It was interesting to me in that moment — interesting enough to spend my limited free time digging into it. That’s reason enough to write about it.
Most of what ends up here will probably be notes to future me. Maybe some of it helps someone else who’s searching for the same error message at 2 AM, but I’m not banking on it.
The Setup
This time, I’m keeping it simple:
- A static site generator (Hugo)
- No comments, no analytics, no JavaScript frameworks — just markdown files and words
- A custom theme that looks like what I want (if
man pageshad a design budget). I’m not a frontend person by any stretch, but I do like it when something looks nice. Using someone else’s theme means rolling with the punches when things don’t work the way you want. Building my own is more fun, even if it’s permanently a work in progress
Why “smrtguy”?
While I’m at it — the name isn’t me calling myself smart. It’s closer to the opposite. Ask any developer how they feel at the end of a long debugging session and the answer is usually somewhere between “genius” and “complete idiot,” sometimes in the same hour. That’s the whole joke. I misspelled it on purpose because calling yourself “smartguy” unironically would be insufferable.
If that feeling resonates with you, good. It should. Most of us are just figuring it out as we go.
Write more. Stop forgetting everything I learn. That’s basically it.
Let’s see how it goes.