You have a similar note-taking format as I do.
If you want to learn git (if you don’t know it already), consider putting your notes in a git repository, which is a great way to learn and take notes at the same time.
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Learning GIt is on my bucket list. Exciting, innit ?
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I can confirm this as well.
Some learn better by reading, some are more visual learners. While I do learn a lot reading, my retention, well, it sucks. But, something magical happens between the pen and the paper. I hate writing, as I can type so much faster, but I don’t retain very well from typed notes either.
I will type notes when I watch video’s, read a post on the internet, or when reading a book. I keep these notes in my home directory for easy access.
However, if I am studying for certification…it’s back to notebook an pen. Back in 2019, I found myself out of work due to a organizational change in which I position was eliminated. I bought a book to study for the Security+ cert and then passed the exam 2 weeks later…and some 60+ pages of handwritten notes. The following month I passed the Cyber Security Analysts+ exam using the same method. I should also mention that I’ve been working in IT Ops for 25+ years so most of the material was not completely foreign to me.
I love the idea of commit one’s notes to git. I’ll be doing this soon.
BTW, I made some good notes from @Jay’s series on VIM, although I already knew most of it, but I still learned a couple of new tips. Right now, I’m working my way through his Ansible series, which I’ve been using at home and at work for a couple of years.
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I think reading or watching + notes + doing works best for me. If skip the “doing” part, then I forget stuff pretty soon. I have quite a few org files (org is a quick outline/note mode for emacs) for stuff now, plus once I learned Ansible a bit, I have lots of comments in our playbooks.
I think it’s important to have some kind of lab environment on old PCs, VMs, Raspberry Pi, etc, that are expendable and can be wiped out and rebuilt without worrying about it. That makes it way less stressful to try things out. VMs are extra nice for that cuz you can make a snapshot real easy before trying something majjor.
Git is really sweet for storing notes, config files, etc. We use yadm (a wrapper for git) for our dotfiles, and regular git projects for our Ansible configs, my notes, learning projects, and dev projects. We run our own GitLab Community Edition in Docker on one of our NAS, and of course it’s always backed up, too.
The other nice thing with using git for notes is that its really easy to work on or use my notes on both my main PC and my Rasperry Pi alt-PC.
So many fun things to learn and use! 
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Good point. The doing part is where the fun (and frustration) begins.
I agree that every IT professional should have a home lab.
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Except for those with exceptional memories unlike the typical human being, all of us have atrocious retention. The typical retention is 5% and that wanes over time. As little as a few weeks. This is a fact of reality of human memory for the vast majority of us.
The single most important way for a person to cope with this fact is attitude. Then they have to build a library of notes and scripts.
@jay has great advice based upon decades of dealing with memory retention issues.
My advice is to be a proactive note taker and be organized about maintaining your notes, photos, scripts or whatever.
I personally use pCloud and OneDrive. @jay uses Git. No matter what method you use to store your personal notes, the most important thing is that you do it. It is vastly more important than having a stellar LinkedIn or blog spot. Afterall, it matters not if you’re all glitz and glamour, make the potential employers salivate to hire you, and then you have no resources to manage that 5% retention issue.
With @jay 's life story, he is a real inspiration. One of the best that I have seen. I can relate to his life hardships on so many levels.
Everybody here I always wish the best of luck.
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This thread is pure-gold for anyone aspiring to be a developer.
I work with four primary languages: Java, C#, Python, Golang (learning), and a bit of Scala. Scripting with Bash is more or less a utility. Switching between interrupted languages such as Python back to strongly typed such as Java or C# can wreak havoc on your brain, not to mention the library’s and various implementation between web apps, RESt API’s, Database ORM’s and so on down the line.
Code Snippets, Canned Scripts, Lots of Note-Docs, and being organized is key to success. Jays Ansible / Docker series are very good example of organizing repetitive tasks. The same could be said of Container / Cloud-Init Scripts. Likewise, many IDE’s / Editors have snippet repos built in. There’s also things like Github Gists, etc that you can store longer code blocks, the same for Gitlab.
I’m a big fan of HashiCorp, particularly of Consul, Vault, Vagrant, and Nomad. Writing scripts once that can be re-used often will make you more productive, consistent, and overall a better developer (less bugs, easier to troubleshoot, etc). That doesn’t take away from the need to learn a scripting language or two, however, it makes life a whole lot easier once you got it figured out.
Anyway, I’m glad to see so many folks on here that really want to learn. Nobody said this stuff was easy, and it can be seriously frustrating at times, but “I think” is worth the effort in the end.
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The brain wreck, and subsequent suffer bus ride, applies to all the things that I do as well. I am a software and security test engineer. My prior employers always train wrecked my (or my team’s) work plans. When employers have employees jumping all over the place, re-directing or diverting their focus, it just leads to poor results. I have yet to find an employee at any of the companies I’ve worked for where they were able to effectively cope such that they produced quality at a high level. The ones I talked to, they all hated operational chaos.
I think the memory and focus problem applies to anything IT related. Employers expect employees to adapt to chaos and disorganization in IT, but in the medical field would never dare when it comes to something such as the medical industry. In fact, that industry does just about everything it can to ensure chaos does not happen because it causes mistakes. And with mistakes comes big civil law suits. It is not as if the IT liability is not significant, but since human lives are rarely at-risk, the IT industry gets away with monumental amounts of negligent disorganization.
IT is a sheet show. Plain and simple. It is how one copes with that sheet show that differentiates the big boys from everybody else. @jay is the best example of a person who went through countless personal hardship but did not give up. It took him years to gain momentum.
Patience and perseverance are the two greatest personality traits for IT success. Everybody wants to take the shortcut to expert. The person that is willing to endure the years of toil to get to expert, they get there while others dropped out of the endeavor long ago. The turtle is the one that wins the IT skills “race.” That’s just my two cents.
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Indeed. I thought I had it rough growing up, but after listing to his story, I’ve got nothing to complain about.
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Hello Jay,
Do you have a short list of suggestions or can you do a vid on how to use GitHub as part of creating a portfolio?
Here is my problem with online profiles… in the past I had my identity stolen from my resume on Monster and ZipRecruiter. It took 5 years and thousands of dollars in legal fees to get that all fixed. I have been advised by legal counsel that a second identity theft will cause 10X more damage than the first one and will be a lot more expensive than the first clean-up.
Therefore, I am really against public profiles or posting work online that can readily be linked to me personally. All the security pros say public profiles are a bad idea in no uncertain terms. With OSINT and social engineering, a tiny tidbit of personal data can and does lead to personal financial problems for thousands daily. No public LinkedIn. No GitHub where anyone can connect it to me personally.
I have discussed this with potential employers and most just seem to not care. They have the attitude “sorry about your luck but no public profile, no job.” It is the most obnoxious and offensive attitude I have ever encountered with potential employers.
Anyway, can you make a small guide on how you accomplished this ?:
Just follow the GitHub tutorial ?
Any recommendations on how to limit access to your GitHub ?
Thank you
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It sucks that so many ignoramuses are running companies or their HR departments. 
You can easily set up your own GitLab as a Docker image, too. That’s what we do. Ours is running on our Synology NAS, but you can run it on anything Docker will run on. Plus, GitLab has really good documentation on their site.
Be sure to make regular backups, of course.
Kind of an aside; what do you manage all those .md files with? I have a similar directory but using the Org-Roam package in Emacs. It’s really nice and along with the Magit (Git interface package) makes is super nice. 
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@Buffy - I really like Gitlab / Gitgub pages and use static site generators for this type of thing. I’m particularly fond of MkDocs (there are many to chose from) as it uses simple Yaml and Markdown files organized in a folder/file structure to create static HTML sites.
Here’s an example / some features of a site that I work on when I have time (its more of a hobby than work really):
There are lots of generators out there, but this one suits me well due to the Python aspect, and it has many plugins to enhance site functionality.
To publish to a static site like Github Pages, it’s a simple command (the links above are hosted on GH pages)
# In your docs directory, type the following
mkdocs deploy gh-pages --clean
# and that's it
You can also render it locally on your dev-box using the simple Python web-server
(example) [ ki7mt@5950x:~/Dev/wspr-analytics (main)]
└─➤ $ : mkdocs serve
INFO - Building documentation...
INFO - Cleaning site directory
INFO - Documentation built in 0.41 seconds
INFO - [12:30:01] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000/
# then browse to http://127.0.0.1:8080
All the hard work is done by MkDocs, all we do is supply the Markdown Files.
Anyway, there’s lot of ways to deal with these portfolio sites, but this one in particular is portable and doesn’t require much effort to get it up and running.
Edit : - As for limiting access, you can use any number of options, but htaccess is a very simple method on public sites. You can give out group passwords, expire access when desired, all sorts of things. Just use a UUID generator (pwgen is one such option) and add them to the access list as desired. I wouldn’t say it’s Fort Knox level security, but, it does work well and it’s easy to implement.
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I am just looking for a place to create a portfolio since everybody recommends one - and in my experience potential employers more or less demand one. My experience is that in this day and age if you want to simply be anonymous anyone younger than 30 years of age holds it against you. And those that are older that have bought into the whole “if a person doesn’t have an online presence, then they should be passed over.” Quite frankly, I find the demand of a public online presence to be offensive. Nobody is going to have sympathy nor pay for my legal fees when my identity gets stolen a second time.
I just want to do a Git like Jay Lacroix via my browser and give access to potential employers privately. I do not want it to be publicly visible to anyone.
I have an idea of how Git works. You download and run it from localhost or other device. But I don’t want to do that. I just want to create a GitHub and upload notes as part of a portfolio with assigned private access. Ooops. I’m repeating myself.
Those .md (from what I understood, they are just notes that can be opened in any text editor) files aren’t mine. I wondered myself why they all had the .md extension. They are @jay 's - the person that this site belongs to. He made a screenshot and showed this is how he does it as an example of keeping a library of notes and for building a GitHub portfolio.
In the linux world I’m just starting out. Most people on this site are neophyte beginners. I have other IT expertise. linux ain’t it.
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Point taken. I tend to look at things from a Linux software developer perspective, which is not always the case. The example above would work, in many different use cases, but I wouldn’t consider it a basic implementation.
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Probably you could set up a wordpress portfolio pretty quick and have it so ppl have to log in to see?
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I work in the security side of IT and Wordpress is notorious for constantly being hacked and valuable personal data stolen. It is one of the most targeted website ecosystems out there.
Evidently one can make a private GitHub, but there are problems. For anyone that you want to grant access, they have to be in your GitHub settings as a collaborator. The problem with giving potential employers access then is an obvious one.
It seems the only solution is to make an aliased GitHub with a fictitious persona.
I’m just wondering if it can all be done via a browser as I don’t want to install Git and manage all of that stuff. My plate is already full and there’s just no room to add more stuff that I have to manage. That’s why I’m looking for the browser-only route.
Anyone know if I set up a GitHub page if I will be able to do everything via a web browser ?
Thanks
While I don’t know what you’re referring to as everything, the short answer is, you can do many things through a web browser on most Git Service Providers: Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. That would include, but certainly not be limited to:
- Creating and managing repositories
- Setting security policies
- Adding, editing and removing files, etc
- Manage pull-requests, merge branches, etc.
The capabilities and documentation is far to vast to reiterate here, but, the Github Main Docs Site is well laid out. Even though I’ve been a frequent flyer of Github since ~2010-ish, I still find the Get Started Guide to be quite helpful. The search functionality on the docs site is descent as well.
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Thanks to the both of yah… @Buffy and @KI7MT
I spent about 2 hours watching a vid and figuring things out by exploring. Installed git onto Fedora. I even managed to figure out how to push with 2FA enabled. LOL.
GitHub will work.
Too much to learn. Too much to do. So little time.
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Nice !!
I didn’t catch that you were using Fedora or I’d checked it out. I’m using / testing AlmaLinux as CentOS got the axe from IBM / RedHat.
I’d hazard to say, many of us on the Linux side figure things out by exploring. That’s part of the fun of Linux, there’s no shortage of choice !!
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I’d hazard to say, many of us on the Linux side figure things out by exploring.
This has been my reality for every last thing in IT. I’m on a tough, frustrating adventure of discovery that will never end.
There are no shortcuts. There is only pain.