I have been thinking of formalizing the home IT infrastructure as a small company, meaning to manage it as we do for the company environment. It might be difficult to be exactly the same as company environment as some of the tools are not free and need licenses to work as they do for company environment, but I can at least try to make it work similarly. The main point here is to manage the environment in a more standard way. For example, I will need some good DR solution for my data, and will need some kind of KB platform for the issues I have experienced and might experience again in the future.
One of the main reasons that make me decide to formalize the home IT infrastructure is I haven’t developed a good habit of regularly backing up my data, especially accounts and passwords, and the problems I have experienced and the solutions that fixed such problems. So when I need some of the accounts and passwords, or when I experience the same problems again, I will need to figure out from the very beginning and that sometimes can be quite time consuming. It’s like I have climbed to the middle of the mountain, and now I could have continued from where I stopped, but because of not saving what I have achieved, I now need to start from the very foot of the mountain. It will take me a lot of time and effort to achieve what I have already achieved before. So I think it’s worth figuring out a better way to keep what I have completed so that I can continue from where I stopped the next time I am back to it again.
Maybe it works for life as well, or at least partially. This is one of the main benefits I have noticed from working in the companies, especially the big companies, apart from the skills my job trained me for and the money I have earned for what I have done: the very mature and efficient way to manage things. Most of the companies, especially those who have done quite well in their main fields, have very well developed ways to manage things and people to get the things done efficiently and smartly. They will do keep doing the things, especially the basic things again and again, trying to achieve again and again what they have already achieved, as I am good at doing like above. And they have a very well documented procedures to handle big problems and also learn from what they did wrong and what they did great. I think this part is even more important than the skills we have learnt and money we have earned, as the skills we can learn from somewhere else and the money we can earn from doing something else or for someone else, but a good company with good culture and environment can provide such valuable lessons which might be difficult for us to learn from other companies and environments.
Back to the topic, different from the corporate environments, there are many tools (third-party, external) available for us to manage our personal things, like accounts/passwords, articles, references, planing, etc. which can be easily deployed and put into use. But I am still thinking of developing and managing, at least some of them, myself manually. One reason is I will manage such tools/platforms myself, with the data stored locally on my own hosts, no need to worry about the third-party tools retiring or just disappearing, leaving my data lost forever (which does happen). The second reason is I can try some of the platforms used by the companies so that I am practising and getting better understanding of such platforms while doing my home related work. But I will need evaluate the options and develop a good way so that the management can be consistent and I don’t need to migrate them from one platform to another frequently. Let’s see how it works.