83 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
83 lines
4.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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type: blog-post
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title: Building your own personal development platform
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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
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draft: false
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date: 2024-01-29
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updates:
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- time: 2024-01-29
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description: first iteration
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tags:
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- "#blog"
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---
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A personal development platform is to a craftsman what the workshop is. It is
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the place we come to tinker, relax, expand our skills, be frustrated, be happy,
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and spend too many ours on our own refining our skills and building our own
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sanctuary.
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There is nothing like kicking back in the chair, watching your own services get
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merged in git, built, deployed and finally be available to you and your users. I
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expect it to be the same as when a craftsman holds up a fixture that they made
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themselves using the CNC they themselves assembled. You can see all the flaws,
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but you're still satisfied with the tool and rely on it to do work. Nothing is
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perfect, a tool never it.
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To me, my personal platform is a labor of love, time and refinement. I've spent
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countless hours tinkering, solving problems, and just having fun. Again I should
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stress my platform will never be yours, never truly, you might see a snapshot of
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it, it is open source after all. But I constantly iterate, improve and pivot.
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Unlike a professional product it is never whole, or at least attempting to be.
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To expose my platform to you means that I'd have to curate it in a way to make
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it presentable. For even I sometimes get lost in the jungle that is my tools. As
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an engineer you will constantly build, and build, and build. It can sometimes be
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difficult to remember how a certain part works even if it was myself whom built
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it from scratch.
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# Sharing my platform
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I'd still like to attempt to share said snapshot of what my own workshop looks
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like, give you a little peak inside, have you play around with the tools a bit.
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Maybe do a project or two, then leave. Take the learnings back, and develop your
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own in your own image, with your preferred approach, maybe start with a few of
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mine, and continuously build on.
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So for the next few articles, I'll focus on key pieces of my own platform. We'll
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start with something basic, like hosting web servers and whatnot at home, until
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we gradually can deploy some services automatically from git. I've built all my
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tools on open source software, so you should be able to pick apart and replace
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parts as we go.
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Nothing should be as complicated that you couldn't just choose another
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programming language or application to do the same work. I'd even encourage it,
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choose whatever fits your needs and wants the best. Remember only work on the
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tools you need and want to build. If you don't find it fun building applications
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or tools, choose those tools from the open source library and built what you
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want on top of that.
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My own platform is built from the principle that I'd like a convenient way of
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releasing software to others, be they tools or services. That is because at work
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my role is a Platform Engineer, I spent far too many hours thinking about how to
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remove work from others, such that they can work on what they do best.
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You will have a different goal, you will not know it in the beginning, and you
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probably won't know it by the end, but you should get a taste of what you find
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most enjoyable and pivot from there. Sometimes my articles won't be picture
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perfect, so I expect you to go and tinker if you find a problem, or contribute
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it to the template repository either as an issue, or pull request.
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## The workshop series
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I will continue to develop this series of time, for now feel free to follow
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along or ask questions in:
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[https://discord.gg/vwNCMTSVxA](https://discord.gg/vwNCMTSVxA) and on my own git
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server:
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[https://git.front.kjuulh.io/workshop](https://git.front.kjuulh.io/workshop)
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(will be synced to GitHub as well as:
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[https://github.com/kjuulh/workshop-intro](https://github.com/kjuulh/workshop-intro))
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they all are fairly empty for now. More to come.
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This page should serve as the index of what I endearingly call `The Workshop`
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series.
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