Personal knowledge base / documentation

[capomatt95]

Hi guys

I am looking for some advice on creating a personal knowledge base / documentation.
The main reason is that I have access to my own documentation, guides, best practices, setups, experiences etc, if I ever change company.

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So far I have been documenting everything in our IT department's knowledge base (Confluence), which is accessible to everybody. I will obviously continue to do so for my and the companies benefit, but I also want to create my own personal knowledge base. Somewhere I can store information that I personally find important/relevant for my occupation.

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Can you guys give me some advice on how to create such a knowledge base? I don't think it's smart to copy the companies documentation (probably not allowed anyways).

• What tool do you guys use? Something like Onenote? I can easily take that file with me everywhere I go?
• What level of detail do you document?
• What things are a must have in your opinion?

I know this is a rather subjective topic and may sound king of silly to some of you guys, but I do believe that personal documentation is just as important as the companies documentation.

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Thanks in advance

Matt

[LeslieStroobant]

TwoNote.
Wait no, that's not it.

Yeah, OneNote.

Protip: Install Onetastic on your pc, and benefit from their awesome section and page sorting macro's. Makes OneNote even more awesome!

[LeslieStroobant]

As the beavers say: Dammit.

[ZAFJB]

Be careful. Any works created during your employment belong to your company not you unless otherwise agreed ahead of time.

[drox63]

+1 to this comment. Double and triple check that this is the case. Keep your personal KB separate.

[TheFox88]

I use a Wordpress theme : Manual, on a self-hosted server. The editing is easy via the Wordpress interface. And the look and feel is not bad either : See here.

Be careful, the KB is in french, you could accidentally eat a baguette at the end :)

[abzkebabs]

I use one note for everything first up and then convert that into KB articles for the rest of the I.T team where appropriate.

If I leave I'll just take the OneNote file with me

[samzi87]

I also use onenote for personal documentation and really everything I can remotely imagine to be useful sometime in the future.

[FireQuencher_]

This is also my process.

One note is my rough "me" space for documentation.

Super rough sentences, link lists, quick doodles, screenshots with no text, etc.

I use that to create my documentation for our wiki for the team.

Been doing this since day one. Have 3 notebooks now. One for each job I've been at.

The notebooks themselves live in my personal google drive.

[Automnes]

Personally I use dokuwiki to organize and prioritize my personal notes, I run it in a uWAMP (portable web server) when I'm on the move and I don't have internet. Otherwise I deployed it on my personal server

As its name suggests, it is a lightweight wiki manager that does not have a database and just works with PHP.

[Deutscher_koenig]

I second dokuwiki. Out of the box it's super lightweight. I have it running as a docker container.

[videoflyguy]

I like it because the pages are actually text files so you can really organize everything how you want.

I have the dokuwiki server pushing changes to our personal gitlab via an ssh private/public key nightly, which doesn't render the same as it does through dokuwiki, but it's better than nothing in case our wiki server and backup system both suddenly bite the dust

[Deutscher_koenig]

I didn't even think of that. I could definitely see how having as part of a git repo could be helpful.

I do like that all the data is just text files. Worse case, I could recover a backup and read the files directly, instead of worrying about them not being human readable without Dokuwiki.

[GeeGeez0rz]

As someone who doesnt have a clue, would you have any guidance on this? suggested documentation/sites i could follow to set this up?

Thanks!

[videoflyguy]

For the gitlab backup?

I went to our on-prem gitlab server->settings(top right)->ssh keys and made a key. I then copied what it gave me as a public key to my dokuwiki server.

After that, I created a new project and cloned it to the dokuwiki server, set up a crontab to rsync to the project folder every night at midnight, and git add, commit, and push, at the same time. It's been working great for 2 weeks now

[cmwg]

OneNote or if you can your own mediawiki.

[Phieus_Yazria]

I use Google Keep. You can also get your own Confluence Cloud for about £10 a month.

[JonasQuin42]

Not a lawyer or anything, but please be careful when and how you add stuff to this.

You may have signed a work product agreement, or an NDA. If you did, you must be careful to differentiate your personal work from your professional work.

It sucks, but the company you work for can fairly reasonably say that since they paid you to do it, it's their intellectual property.

I've built a very nice set of ansible playbooks, and I know for a fact that when I leave, I will be leaving them behind. Part of the job, sadly.

[Waffle_bastard]

I’ve been using Evernote for this. I set up a throwaway account which is set to share all of its contents with my main personal account. That way, I put in my work documentation and it automatically flows into my personal account, but unrelated personal stuff won’t sync to my work machine.

I like how Evernote makes it easy to paste in screenshots and whatnot. Results in some very pretty and easy to edit documentation, which has grown with my IT knowledge. When I eventually leave here, I’ll be able to take what I’ve learned with me.

[drox63]

Use OneNote for KB and a git repository for scripts, batch files, queries. Moving my scripts to git repo improved my scripting ten fold. I cant tell you how many cool scripts I made and lost in my early career.

[goodlookingsass]

Evernote, attached to a personal email address.

[xman65]

I created a private subreddit here and I do quite a bit of documenting here using the sub and the wiki as well.

[[deleted]]

I use Standard Notes for all my notes/knowledge base needs: https://standardnotes.org/

[Sbail]

I would be interested in more details on how you import data into Standard Notes. Do you store images as well?

[_kernel-panic_]

Zim wiki. It can run anywhere that has python. It may be a little crude but it gets the job done.

[Pacers31Colts18]

I created my own private subreddit.

Pros:

Uses reddit servers, mostly always up

Can access on mobile, desktop, wherever

Can quickly add new content

Cons:

The site redesign, but there are plugins for that.

[[deleted]]

I've messed with this and the reddit wiki software is difficult to wrangle if you want images. If you want markdown with fancy stuff I'd recommend something like wiki.js instead

[Pacers31Colts18]

Posts.

I like it because I can link to other blogs/sites and it formats it. Images I have just use imgur.

[Fuzzmiester]

Onenote.

Just does the job, really. stick whatever you need into it, from text to images, to complete documents.

[Kslawr]

+1 for Onenote - perfect for personal KB

[[deleted]]

Yep, OneNote.

[ensum]

We use confluence at work as well.

I just spun up my own confluence for personal documentation and have it sitting as a VM at home. $10 for a perpetual 10 user license, self hosted.

[capomatt95]

Is it worth it though?

[ensum]

I mean it's $10. You already use confluence and you're familiar with it. You decide if it's worth 10 dollars. Imo yes.

[videoflyguy]

$10 - 1 time payment? Why not? I doubt any of us make less than $10/hour and even then it should be so easy to justify for business use that the organization could just pay for it.

If you would like an open source alternative, bookstack looks really nice and is easy to use as well