orjangj / cookbook

The book of how-to

cookbook

Welcome to my personal book of "how-to".

This cookbook is a braindump of all my culminated knowledge on certain technologies, best-practices, or ideas within several technology domains.

You might wonder "why even bother writing a cookbook when you can just google it?". I'll admit, I google all the time. Show me an experienced software developer who doesn't google for solutions or ideas when faced with a problem they do not remember/know how to solve! In fact, I think being proficient with search engines is key to being a successful software developer. Anyway, I'll give you my few cents on why I take the time to write my own personal cookbook of "how-to".

My brain does not have the storage capacity and memory retention to remember every aspect and detail of a technology or tool. For the most part of my career, I've been working as a consultant in the embedded software development sector. I've worked on bare-metal and OS-driven applications on microcontrollers, and on powerful embedded processors using the linux kernel. Heck, I've even been responsible for an entire self-managed CICD infrastructure administering services such as Jenkins, HashiCorp Vault and Jfrog Artifactory to name a few.

Anyway, as a consultant you jump from one project to another on regular intervals. The tasks you are hired to solve in one project does not necessarily align with tasks you worked on in other projects (unless you're constantly being hired as a specialist within a single problem domain). Even the set of tools you're required to use differ from project to project. My point is, I'm more often than not put in a situation where my ability to adapt and learn new technologies, tools or ideas is more important than my ability to remember prior knowledge. Basically, I've evolved into becoming this "Jack of all trades, master of none" type of developer - or how I like to phrase it - "a potato" (by the way, potatoes can be a wonderful addition to almost any dish, but they're never quite the "master" of the meal, right?. But I digress... :D).

Nevertheless, when you have the luxury of learning so many different things, keeping track of all that knowledge becomes hard if you're not exposed to it regularly. So I have come to the conlusion that I don't want to spend hours googling for information or a solution to a particular problem I already have some experience with (unless it's actually faster to just google it) but can't quite remember how it worked or how I solved it. It's like equations and formulas in math - you don't spend time practicing and remembering them if you have a "cheat-sheet" you can reference whenever the need arises.

I think personal cookbooks are a great tool whenever you need to revisit a topic you've previously worked on. Especially, if you already know that your recipies are based on good and legitimate references/resources and you're expected to provide fast and good results in a new project.

If you've come this far, then "kudos". I never expected you to get this far, so I'll give you this virtual clap on you shoulder - "clap". I really do hope you'll find my personal cookbook of "how-to" useful and informative. If you by any chance find that some of my recipies are lacking in clarity, or even worse, just plain wrong, then don't hesitate to file an issue :)

Enjoy!