You know that thing folks get sometimes where they're having a technical problem, they look it up online, and the top relevant hit is one of their own blog posts? And it does in fact answer the technical question?

I just had something like that, but for code I was trying to figure out, and instead of a Web search it was grepping through a folder of checked-out projects.

Oh.

I wrote the code to do this exact thing two years ago.

@randomgeek

I frequently consult my own book about linux admin, because I have no memory of how to use things like parted and lv-extend

I've got a 200 page google doc called JT-cookbooks. It's just a bunch of weird disorganized invocations. It's become a first reference for lots of my coworkers.

Writing down things that work matters more than any management types would believe.

@johntimaeus that's a big part of why I pulled my toot and tweet archives into my notes. I tend to dump stray thoughts as sort of an ADHD venting mechanism. Problem is some of those thoughts are good, and Twitter / Mastodon search has never been great.

Course, new problem. My public brain now has 6,000 pages and weighs 4.5GB without optimizations.

Working on that now.

@randomgeek

I'm wondering how many people around here have an equivalent, and what it would take to aggregate, organize, edit, verify and publish as a collected work.

Most of mine are recipes, 1-5 lines to build a thing, or fix an issue. "Fix chrome silent fail on cloned VM" is one I added today. But you'll spend an hour flopping at Google trying to find a fix before hitting the one that works. You may also break a lot of other stuff listening to crackoverflow and AI plop.

@johntimaeus
I set the history on my shell fairly large and periodically save it to a file. At work I keep a One Note Notebook where I also keep other instructions or patterns for various thing. it's shareable and try to keep it searchable (by using headings etc) at home it's mostly text files.
The shell history files, if consulted often enough, become shell scripts.

There's a pretty good culture in my work of making these things into knowledgebase content, either in our service management tool, our code repo, or engineering portals, but sometimes people forget it's there.
@randomgeek
@johntimaeus
Things I recently reviewed:
* Rotating the certificates in a Java keystore (now a script)
* LUKS and LVM
* Using a smart card certificate for SSH/SCP (now a shell alias and script)
* Quick and dirty nc (testing a service, sending a file)
* Using that temperamental printer that makes the best plots
* Which conference rooms have the best equipment for particular kinds of meetings


@randomgeek