I’m 56, learning DevOps from scratch, and I have a problem with tools.

Not using them — I love tools. The problem is spending more time building the perfect learning environment than actually learning. It’s a trap I know well and fall into anyway.

This time I decided to be deliberate about it. If I was going to build a system, it would be one that genuinely serves the learning — not just looks good in screenshots.

The Problem

I’m working through a Docker and Kubernetes course on Udemy while simultaneously doing hands-on work on Bitfrost, my home server. Theory in the morning. Practice in the evening. That’s the plan.

The problem is keeping it all connected. Notes in one place, tasks in another, calendar somewhere else, and no single view of what today actually looks like. Every morning starts with five minutes of tab-switching before I even start learning.

Why Obsidian

I already had an Obsidian vault. It had notes in it — good notes, actually, from earlier in the year. But it was a collection, not a system. No dashboard. No structure that connected the daily work to the bigger goal.

What I wanted was simple: one place that shows me what I need to do today, tracks what I’ve done, and holds the knowledge I’m building. A command center.

Obsidian has a plugin called Tasks that turns checkbox items into a queryable task database. Another plugin, Full Calendar, renders markdown files as calendar events. A third, Templater, automates note creation with dynamic content. Put those together with a custom CSS dashboard and you have something genuinely useful.

The First Version

The first version of the DevOps Learning Command Center was a single 🧠 DevOps Learning Command Center.md file with a multi-column layout. Left column: today’s tasks pulled by the Tasks plugin. Right column: progress bars, project status, quick capture. Centre: schedule.

It worked. It was also completely manual — I was creating tasks by hand, updating progress counters by hand, and the whole thing depended on me remembering to do those things consistently.

That’s where Claude Code came in. But that’s the next post.

The vault lives at Jano-sqpDev/sqpdev_obsidian_vault on GitHub if you want to follow along.