Why I Started This Blog

I've started blogs before. Let them die. This one's different. (I hope.)

The Home Server Blog

Years ago I had a blog about setting up my first home server. It started as personal notes on virtualization, then I thought "maybe someone else finds this useful" and put it online. A few posts in, I kept meaning to write the next one. Weeks turned into months. I didn't even notice when the hosting lapsed.

Some of those posts are still floating around on the Wayback Machine. I keep meaning to dig them up and see if any of it's worth resurrecting. Maybe someday.

The Self-Actualisation Blog

More recently I started a different blog at lukemanning.name. This one was inspired by a Dan Koe video where he talked about self-actualisation (becoming the most authentic version of yourself, finding meaning and purpose). He said something that stuck with me:

"Your niche is self-actualisation. What makes you unique are the curiosities, the interests, skills and experience that you gain along the way, because that is unique to everybody."

I'd never heard the term before. Went down a rabbit hole reading about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, personal growth, the whole thing. Got excited. Started a blog about it.

That blog lasted a handful of posts. The topic was too broad. "Personal growth" is one of those things that sounds meaningful but is hard to write about consistently when you're also working full time and building things. I didn't have a specific enough focus.

What Actually Made It Click

The thing that finally made this blog happen wasn't a grand realisation about blogging. It was me spending way too long debugging a Velite setup issue, finally getting it working, and then three days later having no idea what I'd done to fix it. I'd closed the terminal, moved on, and the knowledge was just... gone.

That happened more than once. I'd figure something out, feel smart for about five minutes, then lose the solution somewhere between Slack messages and browser tabs. Writing it down was the obvious fix. I'd just never actually done it consistently.

The home server blog was actually closer to what I wanted than I realised at the time. Personal notes about specific problems, shared publicly. Not tutorials. Not guides. Just "here's what broke and here's what I did."

Will This One Last?

I don't know. The home server blog didn't die because the topic was wrong. It died because I stopped making time. That could happen again. I don't have a clever answer for that.

What I do know is the topic is narrower now. I'm not writing about abstract personal growth. I'm writing about specific technical problems I'm facing day-to-day with specific solutions (or non-solutions). And the raw material is always there. I'm building things every week, and things break every week.

That's easier to sustain. There's always something breaking.