Added Obsidian to my workflow
Week 12 was a very productive week for me. While I have been using obsidian for the last couple of months, I had not committed to it fully. I was ignorant of its potential or the possibilities. I did have a problem to solve, I’ve been using Standard Notes for the last couple of years and I was not very happy with it. It’s seemed like I needed to pay for it to be able to access the features that would get my notes to function as my second brain. I installed and reviewed zettlr thinking I could use it to manage my blog post. I watched a few zettlr vs Obsidian youtube videos which show me that I was only scratching the surface with Obsidian. I went down the rabbit hole on the zettelkasten method and I decided to make an effort to organize my second brain.
In my new workflow, I’m being intentional about capturing my daily fleeting thoughts in my daily Journal. I’ll then roll up my daily journal into my weekly reflections which will directly be input for my monthly report. Finally, at the end of the month I’ll roll up the most topical high level things into my monthly highlights report. The goal here is to capture data points that will feed into my next performance review.
I’m now using obsidian for all my notes. I’ve migrated all my Standard Notes over to Obsidian. The graph in Obsidian looks very cool but I am not sure how useful it is. Over time I will figure that part out. I generate a lot of notes on a daily basics. Usually I am following a series of steps to carry out some action, such as an upgrade. I’d drop these notes in sublime text which I sometimes copy to JIRA tickets but eventually I would close these files and in the process losing valuable information. Now, I’m saving this information at the bottom of my daily journal and I figure I will eventually process and move the important snippets over to the notes folder as I go along.
What did I learn this week that excited me?
I consume a lot of logs as a part of my day job and my eyes are not the greatest so I am not fast with spotting things that are important. I started piping my logs to ccze and it made an instant impact on the readability of the logs. ccze beautifies your log files and add colour which improves readability.
Started work on a new Cert.
I thought that the KCNA certification would be my path to skilling up on Kubernetes. When I drilled down into what the objectives were I realized that the KCA was more inline with my goals. I got the Udemy course on a discount and I am underway.
When to write
I have figured out that I should do all my writing at the start of the day since when I leave it to the end of the day I never get it done since my energy is low, there are so many distractions and I just don’t want to do it. I’m still in process of figuring out how to be better at writing and discovering how to improve my quality and output. That’s one of the goals of my blog.
On the Homelab front
The Blog
I had a lot of fun setting up my Hugo blog. If this is going to work longterm I will need to automate as much of the process as possible. I’ve got the Gitea action working and that it quite satisfying. Now, When I push a change, the Gitea action runs the build. When I land the change to the main branch I can then go trigger the rundeck job which that pushes the public folder up to the NFS volume I have mounted into the nginx container. I’ll need to trigger the Rundeck job via a webhook at some point.
I know that I have an over complicated the setup. I’ll refactor things and customize the nginx container with a copy of the public folder. That way I can ditch the NFS volume from the setup and the container can run on any of the docker swarm nodes. This might involve setting up a local docker registry.
My Shows
I’m all caught up on Wheel of Time and the House of David. I’m really enjoying the Wheel of Time. Episode 4 of WoT ended too fast and this is a sign that it was enjoyable. Admittedly I don’t think I would have followed the plot the way I did had I not watched a youtube episode 4 review video. Spoiler Alert, I don’t mind spoilers. I have no intention of reading the books.
Episode 6 of House of David was below expectations. I’m having a hard time with the depiction of Goliath as a literal giant. It’s still very entertaining watching the political machinations.