Welcome to Docwright

Site orientation

You can read this site in order, or just jump to whichever section interests you. It starts with backups, because that’s what saves you when a laptop dies or a file goes missing. Then it moves to version control, which sounds technical but mostly just means keeping a history of your drafts so you can get back the version you had, say, last Thursday. After that comes security and moving over to Linux. That a big move, so the posts go slowly. Then it moves to running AI models on your own machine, so nothing you write gets sent off to someone else’s servers. And last, how to put your writing online as a website like this, using mdBook. None of these require you to know how to code.

The core problem

Think of a book that changed your mind; not the one you enjoyed, but one that moved you to disavow a position you once held. Now find your notes on it; not the book, the notes, the objection you scrawled in the margin, the passage you copied out, the thought you had and scribbled at at dawn’s nautical twilight.

Good for you if you can. Most do not even takes notes. And many who do, for various reasons, cannot find them when needed. A lot of labour was wasted. And that essentially is what this site attempts to address: Help people work faster and lose less of what they learn.

If you are going to spend years learning – reading, studying, writing, researching, making notes, developing ideas, cultivating a body of work, a garden, if you will – you need tools, weapons even, to keep it. What’s the point of building something you cannot keep and, more importantly, pass down to your children?

For those who don’t read

“Lol, I don’t even read,” one might say, “and I certainly don’t write.” Well, my friend, then I invite you to start today. There’s no other way to a life of significance. Socrates, on trial for his life, said the unexamined life is not worth living. Moreover, watching reels, shorts, and YouTube videos fry your dopamine receptors, damaging your self-control and focus. The antidote to the doomscrolling addiction is reading, slowly at first, with full attention, and smart notetaking. And if you’re a knowledge worker, reading is the only way to truly become skilled at your vocation. You don’t want to reach your 40s and have nothing to show for it. Develop a skill that’s of service to the community. And the more you read, the more skillful you will grow.

“…the majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called ‘reading oneself to sleep’. They sometimes combine it with desultory conversation; often, with listening to the radio. But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.” – C S Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Why you should also write

The wise not only read voraciously, but they also write. One, writing helps thinking. In fact, if “people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them” (some attribute that quote to George Orwell). So write, even if your memory is perfect. Two, writing helps the next generation stand taller on the shoulders of those who wrote. It doesn’t matter if you’re a farmer, machinist, or plumber. Don’t let your knowledge die with you. Sure, it’s likely that what you have to say has already been said, but you could still in your writing point people to those who’ve said it or said it better. And, finally, write cause you never know when what you considered insignificant becomes valuable to society.

Three, writing is cumulative because ideas intersect. A note written today can become a citation next year, an argument in three years, a chapter in ten, and eventually a book. That happens only if the corpus survives, stays searchable, and stays yours.

With great power comes great responsibility

Our fathers had nothing like the tools now available to us for free. Yet very few ever learn to own the ground their intellectual life. Files live in somebody else’s cloud. Notes are scattered across notebooks, PDFs, Word documents, LLM platforms, browser tabs, and forgotten folders. Research is spread across a dozen applications that do not speak to each other. Private material sits on someone else’s servers, under someone else’s terms. Backups are thin, untested, or absent. Identity rests on passwords held by companies. And publishing waits on someone else’s permission. Why in 2026 would you live like this? You have no excuse. It’s never been easier to spin up a blog or online book and share with others what you’ve learnt, all for free.

The goal is not a resume

The goal is not to become a sysadmin. It’s not to collect technical skills so you can show off on your resume. The goal is wisdom, understanding, a life worth living, maybe passing an inheritance to the next generation. In pursuing those goals, Docwright teaches you about tools that will increase your productivity and power, yet the tools are not the garden.