---
type: blog-post
title: Building your own personal development platform
description: I am going to start building a series called "The Workshop" where we are going to do what it takes to see what a personal development platform looks like, build our own, roll out services in production
draft: false
date: 2024-01-29
updates:
  - time: 2024-01-29
    description: first iteration
tags:
  - "#blog"
---

A personal development platform is to a craftsman what the workshop is. It is
the place we come to tinker, relax, expand our skills, be frustrated, be happy,
and spend too many ours on our own refining our skills and building our own
sanctuary.

There is nothing like kicking back in the chair, watching your own services get
merged in git, built, deployed and finally be available to you and your users. I
expect it to be the same as when a craftsman holds up a fixture that they made
themselves using the CNC they themselves assembled. You can see all the flaws,
but you're still satisfied with the tool and rely on it to do work. Nothing is
perfect, a tool never it.

To me, my personal platform is a labor of love, time and refinement. I've spent
countless hours tinkering, solving problems, and just having fun. Again I should
stress my platform will never be yours, never truly, you might see a snapshot of
it, it is open source after all. But I constantly iterate, improve and pivot.
Unlike a professional product it is never whole, or at least attempting to be.

To expose my platform to you means that I'd have to curate it in a way to make
it presentable. For even I sometimes get lost in the jungle that is my tools. As
an engineer you will constantly build, and build, and build. It can sometimes be
difficult to remember how a certain part works even if it was myself whom built
it from scratch.

# Sharing my platform

I'd still like to attempt to share said snapshot of what my own workshop looks
like, give you a little peak inside, have you play around with the tools a bit.
Maybe do a project or two, then leave. Take the learnings back, and develop your
own in your own image, with your preferred approach, maybe start with a few of
mine, and continuously build on.

So for the next few articles, I'll focus on key pieces of my own platform. We'll
start with something basic, like hosting web servers and whatnot at home, until
we gradually can deploy some services automatically from git. I've built all my
tools on open source software, so you should be able to pick apart and replace
parts as we go.

Nothing should be as complicated that you couldn't just choose another
programming language or application to do the same work. I'd even encourage it,
choose whatever fits your needs and wants the best. Remember only work on the
tools you need and want to build. If you don't find it fun building applications
or tools, choose those tools from the open source library and built what you
want on top of that.

My own platform is built from the principle that I'd like a convenient way of
releasing software to others, be they tools or services. That is because at work
my role is a Platform Engineer, I spent far too many hours thinking about how to
remove work from others, such that they can work on what they do best.

You will have a different goal, you will not know it in the beginning, and you
probably won't know it by the end, but you should get a taste of what you find
most enjoyable and pivot from there. Sometimes my articles won't be picture
perfect, so I expect you to go and tinker if you find a problem, or contribute
it to the template repository either as an issue, or pull request.

## The workshop series

I will continue to develop this series of time, for now feel free to follow
along or ask questions in:
[https://discord.gg/vwNCMTSVxA](https://discord.gg/vwNCMTSVxA) and on my own git
server:
[https://git.front.kjuulh.io/workshop](https://git.front.kjuulh.io/workshop)
(will be synced to GitHub as well as:
[https://github.com/kjuulh/workshop-intro](https://github.com/kjuulh/workshop-intro))
they all are fairly empty for now. More to come.

This page should serve as the index of what I endearingly call `The Workshop`
series.
