Last Week in Code 003
I like self hosting but have not yet gotten a hosting service to stick to so I have to go through the whole reinstall process every time I switch operating systems. Yes, I run my apps on my PC. So I spent most of the past week setting up some applications. I set up Navidrome for my music server, Firefly III for financial management and Jellyfin for managing my movies and tv shows collection. I also played around some with Snapcast but then learnt how much I’d have to read before I’d be able to use it like a craftsman. So I dropped it.
I learnt a whole lot doing all this and would like to share two main lessons from that.
Take notes, keep them organized.
Most of the apps I set up were docker containers (only snapcast wasn’t). The trouble shooting involved burnt alot of my time and my brain calories. But I’m sure it would have been way more than it was if I did not have preprocessed solutions from previous learning in my notes. I have heard it before but can’t point to from where (maybe my own experience), it involves way more work seeking out info about something the first time you encounter it than later when processing cached solutions. Looking for a solution to a fresh solution always follows the following steps in my experience.
- Go to the internet
- Think of the right query
- Wade through useless solutions (which is a good thing btw)
- Eventually find a good source and then deal with parsing their solution
Now if you have to go through that every time you encounter the same problem (which happens very often with software), it would be such a pain. The solution? Put in the time to process the solution and store it somewhere. It will be a huge future time investment in my opinion. It’s been that way for me at least.
The other thing to add to that is organization. It won’t help much to come back to what you don’t understand except to remind you of your own laziness. There’s ways to keep track of notes. Many apps and workflows (Zettlekasten being the most popular). I personally use Emacs with no fixed worflow yet. I’m hoping these experiences will be why I get to that.
Find projects around which to learn new skills.
I took my first serious ’tutorial’ on docker a while a go and forgot all I learnt after the tutorial ended. I mean I took notes and I’ve mentioned that already but here’s something I realized: I got a wider exposure to what docker can do when I set out with the self hosting project. I also felt I internalized and owned the notes more from using what I’d learnt. The whole running into problems, reading multiple articles unrelated to the problem but related to docker, eventually finding the solution process was more rewarding than any tutorial I had taken before. Now I ain’t saying tutorials are bad or anything. I have notes (some of which include material sourced from tutorials) but I think those ain’t enough in and of themselves.
In other updates
There’s always a lot of new things to come across in the tech space and I have been doing some exploration of my own. I also ran into some real nice articles and found some explorations worth the share. Some you probably haven’t learnt about yet.
News updates
Nice reads
- Don’t delegate understanding
- If you stop hiring Juniors , your Senior Engineers will own you
- Computer Language
- AI Economics don’t make sense
Random finds
As always, I hope you learnt something from that and with that, see you in E004.