# My Take on Documentation


# My Take on Documentation

One thing I’ve learned over the years, is a good wiki works wonders for you not only now but in the future and documentation (in my experience) is very much underrated and overlooked. 

I know personally I was like this in the beginning, I would just love to get started on working on either 3D modelling, get right into coding a project, or not measuring any of my timber before cutting. However, this does nothing to communicate to others what you are planning to do and what you’ve done. I guess you could argue its a behaviour of naiveness or immaturity. 

If you want to do something, you should do it right. 

But look, this doesn’t apply to every case right. Sometimes you have very short deadlines and you need something delivered yesterday. That in itself has a bunch of issues that are the root cause of today’s issue of being very late but we don’t talk about that. But I am trying to emphasise that it’s not the end all be all. It is just good practice. 

Don’t you hate when you recieve a product like furniture, where this furniture has a convoluted design, yet in the box, there are no instructions. It’s very difficult to understand what to do and you end up brute forcing a solution. This is very draining both mentally and physically and these are the tasks that I procrastinate with.

## Current Solution

So current solution for this was to take notes. I started off with Notion for a few years and why I really liked it, my interests veered towards self hosting and I no longer wanted to rely on cloud options as much as I currently do. I feel like self hosting services gets you to learn more about your own data and security and whilst I probably can’t uphold the same performance as Notion or Google for online data storage, I am happy to live with my solutions as they are my own (or at least, I set up other peoples software on my own network and host it to myself so theres a degree of my effort that went into it aha).

This lead me to start looking at alternatives, one thing that caught my eye was Obsidian. It had functionality that allowed you self host into your own git repository (which would end up in my own self hosted GitLab in the future). This attracted me alot alongside the flashy mindmappy diagram where you can view all your notes as nodes and link them all together. I also really like how, like Notion, you were able to write in Markdown and it even supported vim inputs! Ever since diving deeper into the realm of software, I have been wanting to move to more low level document writing and Markdown and nvim does it for me. I have yet to set up a workflow that will allow me to generate nice pdfs with professional formatting for my other future endeavours, however, this is a project for way laterrrr down my career. 

But after using this for about a year, I still haven’t gotten around to setting up my GitLab server, and I the organisation of folders and files is a bit lackluster for me. It just isn’t nice in my opinion but I can’t put my finer on it. It could be due to the way it handles images as their own separate pages and I don’t really know how to structure them in an organised manner. But eh, I like to try new things and I gave it a red hot go. 

Onto my next experience of wikis.

## Wikis

I’ve personally now used Media Wiki, since thats what is currently available at my workplace, and I have been toying around with Wikijs but I would like to stick to one thing and keep it updated and even just use it as a simple note taker for a specific environment ie my Homelab environment, my software projects, specific software projects etc. 

I really like to use the wiki at my work. Theres a lot of knowledge living inside peoples heads that aren’t documented and I’ve kind of made it in my responsibility to learn as much as I can from anyone I speak to and notarise all the knowledge from other people onto this wiki. This also forces me to make my documentation as clear and user focused as possible so that I can point anyone from any team to it so they can pick up any task thrown their way so they don’t have to struggle half as much as I did (endless brute forcing solutions).

Another thing I find really convenient about these wikis is that everything is managed via a website. These sites are generally really lightweight and zippy fast. They are accessible anywhere on the network and they’re fairly intuitive to navigate. My one gripe with Media Wiki however, is when editing pages, I generally click a varity of links to get to the page I want to edit, but there are no breadcrumbs of pages to click on to elevate/go back a page without reloading the page to edit the content of the page you just edited. 

Hopefully I can find another wiki that does this better but at this point in time, I still really like it. 

# Conclusion

Nowadays, I am getting into the habit of keeping a wiki open and accessible so that I can write down anything I learn or any useful tips and tricks I find out. 

I think I’ll go into researching some more options for wikis in the near future and set one up for myself at home. I will possibly look at how I can make one of these accessible over the internet but I don’t know how good of an idea that will be with security and what not. 

I  guess I can stick to remoting into my home network to access my content but I don’t really know right this second. It will come to me aha

# Quote

Hmm for today's quote, I think I will choose something fitting. 


> "Good documentation is the difference between a tool and a trap.” 
>
> \- Unknown