by majke | 2025-08-04 11:16:47+00:00
Internal blog is another thing, but indeed related to chat. Once we figured some techical thing out, I often put it under "personal blog" on wiki under something like ~marek/date-slug. (I'm actually quite upset about jira removing slug from the url and replacing it with random number, this makes url completion much worse. I often titled the wikis funny/witty to make it easier to remember and find)

These were usually quite short notes. Like I did this and that. Or here are instructions I've run. Pretty much a "lab notebook".

Again, this was often useful to people. Folks new what I was working on at that time. Over time more people adapted this style of public note taking (within company), but I have the impression I was more consistent than others.

I did it for many reasons. I genuinely forget things. It was always nice to see comments (like James complaining that I shouldn't do `dpkg -i x.deb`, and instead finally install the package repo in apt-sources!). So again - searchability (a form of documentation), reach (getting feedback), and work log (for planning).

The format was also nice - short, without specific audience in mind. Zero drama, zero effort. Plentiful and low quality. Because it was "blog" and not "pages", this meant it was obvious when the note was written and nobody expected old blogs to be up to date. The lower the friction in note taking - the better.

Finally, I was working with an SRE team, which was tightly knit and communicated very often over daily checkins (which I wasn't invited to) and other informal channels. And I worked from home a bit. This meant I had to find an asynchronous way to communicate with the team. My personal blogs worked nicely. I highly recommend this style to anyone working remotely.

Although I must admit the personal "lab notebook" wiki thing is not scaleable. It's impossible to "follow" more than a handful of people.

I kept statistics. It's fairly obvious when I was most productive. Here it is, my internal blogs on the wiki per quarter:

2013-Q4 | 0 | 2014-Q1 | 0 | 2014-Q2 | 2 | ## 2014-Q3 | 3 | ### 2014-Q4 | 2 | ## 2015-Q1 | 14 | ############## 2015-Q2 | 15 | ############### 2015-Q3 | 57 | ################################################### 2015-Q4 | 60 | ###################################################### 2016-Q1 | 70 | ###################################################################### 2016-Q2 | 71 | ####################################################################### 2016-Q3 | 17 | ################# 2016-Q4 | 23 | ####################### 2017-Q1 | 13 | ############# 2017-Q2 | 22 | ###################### 2017-Q3 | 16 | ################ 2017-Q4 | 25 | ######################### 2018-Q1 | 12 | ############ 2018-Q2 | 9 | ######### 2018-Q3 | 23 | ####################### 2018-Q4 | 14 | ############## 2019-Q1 | 14 | ############## 2019-Q2 | 20 | #################### 2019-Q3 | 18 | ################## 2019-Q4 | 36 | ###################################### 2020-Q1 | 19 | ################### 2020-Q2 | 13 | ############# 2020-Q3 | 4 | #### 2020-Q4 | 3 | ### 2021-Q1 | 4 | #### 2021-Q2 | 8 | ######## 2021-Q3 | 3 | ### 2021-Q4 | 21 | ##################### 2022-Q1 | 4 | #### 2022-Q2 | 12 | ############ 2022-Q3 | 4 | #### 2022-Q4 | 28 | ############################ 2023-Q1 | 14 | ############## 2023-Q2 | 16 | ################ 2023-Q3 | 10 | ########## 2023-Q4 | 6 | ###### 2024-Q1 | 12 | ############ 2024-Q2 | 22 | ###################### 2024-Q3 | 0 | 2024-Q4 | 2 | ## 2025-Q1 | 20 | #################### 2025-Q2 | 3 | ###

Total 784 over 11 years.