Knowledge Management
Mar 29, 2020 • 2 min readKnowledge • Productivity
Ever since I started building systems, I've always had a near obsessive need to keep track of what I was doing. The problem at the time was that I never saw the importance of writing it all down; it was all 'in my head'. Needless to say, that method of doing things is terrible, particularly in a professional setting.
When I first started getting into writing down what I was working on, I didn't really have any system of organization to do it. I was vaguely familiar with the idea of a knowledge base, but it was something that was so unattainable for me, and it just seemed like a lot of work to maintain. Fast-forward a number of years later and I now administer my own knowledge base, which is hosted on two different platforms for redundancy — DigitalOcean in a Ubuntu 18.04LTS droplet, and Confluence, hosted by Atlassian.
Aside from documenting numerous how-to guides and step-by-step tutorials, one of my favorite things to work on is flowcharts. Nothing tells the story of your network quite like a flowchart. They can be large, small, simple or complex. I personally prefer to flesh mine out as much as I can, but still maintain readability.
My latest flowchart for my home network can be seen below:
This particular flowchart was started some time last year, and while maintaining it is a mood job, I do enjoy updating it. For me, it helps to really bring my network to life and also give me a true understanding of just how complex it's become. This extra work gives you a lot of insight into where your network currently is and where it's going. Having your entire network on paper is something I can't stress the importance of enough. It helps for planning and for maintaining.
The point of all of this is to always make sure to keep everything well documented. While I still do have everything all 'in my head', the more I learn, the more I need to write down. I can only see this becoming even more of a trend as my network grows larger and larger.