Spreading Knowledge, and Documentation
I love sharing knowledge. In fact, I love it so much, that I tend to get ahead of myself and try sharing knowledge before even I had a chance to digest it fully, and thus my "explanations" end up confusing those around me. Sometimes I don't even learn it fully myself, and it just falls out of my head in a matter of days.
I think we are all guilty of this to some extent. We set up a YouTube video every time we eat a meal, because god forbid our brains aren't receiving a dopamine hit every 14 milliseconds. We spend the those 30 minutes enjoying some vaguely educational video, pretending we are teaching ourselves something when the only thing being digested is that sandwich.
Honestly, this set up can work for us when we are just learning the basics, the high levels of things. But now I am an Adultâ„¢, and as I delve deeper into the realms of programming, math, self-hosting, 3D printing, and neuroscience, I have no time left to be re-watching content just for me to forget it the next day.
So how can I actually learn it?
Yes, practice is probably the best answer for these things. I believe is remarkably obvious to the none of you who read this blog, so I won't dwell much on it. I became a better programmer by writing programs, over and over again, each time pressing myself to make the next one more optimal.
Of course, you cannot practice everything. I want to practice neuroscience, but I don't think anyone is going to let me poke wires into their brains any time soon, so here I am reading papers and learning concepts out of books instead. I had to find another way to make that process of learning an active one.
A good way to use a few more neurons when learning is to take notes. I have used various note taking tools over the years. OneNote, Xournal++, and probably some others I forget. And don't get me wrong, those note tools are great if you are the only intended audience, but they don't really serve well if your goal is to learn and then to share that knowledge.
Meet BookStack:
This tool is great. You can organize content into shelves, then into books, chapters, and pages. And each page can have text elements, but also embedded images collapsible sections, media, tables, and a whole slew of stuff needed to build whatever documentation you want.
And best of all, its easily self hostable via docker!
As I was going through the self hosting fever, I spun up an instance for myself locally just to write documentation about my various systems. How I configured each VM, details about my various services and devices, trouble shooting steps I took in the past each with sources, etc. Perhaps making my instructions for fixing my self hosted infrastructure run on that self hosted infrastructure is not the best idea, but PDF exports are a great backup.
But Bookstack is a website, you can deploy it on the public internet.
And so I did.
https://knowledge.ramipastrami.engineering
Not gonna lie, as of right now, theres not too much on there. There used to be more actually, but I got rid of it. Why?
Well, originally when I was teaching myself content, I was essentially writing ordered lesson plans as I went a long. I thought this would save me time. I was wrong. Frankly, what I made was rather confusing, kinda a mess, and just not something I felt proud to add on the public internet (though considering the slop that's out there, perhaps I am too hard on myself).
I'll cut to the chase, I made those sections private. So what did I learn to do instead?
Glossarys
Understanding the wide range of ideas to formulate ordered lesson plans comes later in learning, and by then you may have already forgotten various definitions. So why not just write each definition independently in an alphabetical list to start with? Singular concepts are far faster to grasp, and in terms of updating documentation, so much easier to maintain and expand as you keep learning.
At time of writing, I am still quite early in writing my glossaries as I am going over a bunch of learning content once more. But I think once I hit a suitable spot, I will cycle back and be able to create some ordered explanations to go over topics in a better light, and one day perhaps turn those into a YouTube series myself!
But until then, I have much brain organizing to do as I keep learning.
Until next time!
