I’ve been meaning to write more. I have a graveyard of half-finished blog posts scattered across my machines in various note-taking apps. Some of them are years old.
Honestly, I want to write more because I think I suck at it. I mean, I used to be pretty decent at writing back in high school and university. I did really well with essays. But over the years, I’ve gotten lazy about it, and now I think I kinda suck. And like any other skill, you get better by doing it. There’s that thing about needing 10,000 hours to get good at something. I don’t know if that’s true, because I’m sure I’ve put 10,000 hours of writing over the course of my life, and I still think i suck. But then you also have to understand that not just any kind of hours will do. They need to be worthwhile hours, and I know that I won’t get better by not writing with a purpose in mind.
My problem is that I have a hard time finding enough time to do it. Between my day job, a homelab that always needs attention, side projects that multiply faster than I can finish them, and life in general. I tend to work 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, learn just enough to solve the problem, and move on. Every time, I’d think, “I should write about this.”, and then now is another rabbit hole, cause I’d spend three hours setting up a blog framework, get distracted by configuration options, and never actually write anything. I also just procrastinate in favour of doing something that seems like more fun, or more important, or more whatever.
Writing it down.
Over all the years of being a software developer and a tech enthusiant I have found that I keep re-learning things I already figured out. Debugging sessions that took hours, configuration tricks that saved a deployment, and architectural decisions that made sense at the time, but I can’t remember why six months later. All because I didn’t write any of it down, and the funning thing is that in all my career documenting decisions, designs, processes properly is really important. So why haven’t I pulled that into my own life as a habit.
Writing forces you to organize your thoughts. When you have to explain something, even to yourself, you find out pretty quickly where your understanding falls apart. I already tried to do this with code. I automate tasks so I don’t have to remember every step, but the code only captures what, not why. I’ll open something I wrote six months ago and spend twenty minutes just trying to remember what problem it was solving. Writing is the part that fills in the gaps.
Fixing the sucky-ness.
This time, I’m keeping it simple. A static site generator (Hugo), no JavaScript frameworks, just markdown files and words and maybe some ai images. I also decided to build my own theme, just so I wont get lost in the test -> configure -> test -> configure -> test -> start over loop. I wanted something that resembles what man pages would look like if they had a design budget. I’m not really the best frontend person, but I do like it when something looks nice. Using someone else’s theme means rolling with the punches when things don’t go as planned. Building my own is more work, but it’s more fun too. And it is something that will evolve over time.
Most of what ends up here will probably be notes to future me. Not everything I make or learn is going to be interesting to someone else, and that’s fine. If it was interesting enough to spend my limited free time digging into, it’s worth writing about. Maybe some of it helps someone else who’s searching for the same error message at 2 AM, but I’m not expecting my pages to rank high enough for people to see them.
Why “smrtguy”?
The name isn’t me calling myself smart. It’s a joke about how dumb you feel most of the time doing this job. You solve one impossible problem and then spend an hour debugging something that turns out to be a typo. I misspelled it on purpose because calling yourself “smartguy” without a hint of irony would just be too much.
So that’s it. Write more, stop forgetting things, and maybe get a little less sucky along the way.