I went to message my friend Josh (https://josm.rip/) to ask for ideas for my first blog post. That was meant to be a simple, five-minute job. I went over to Josh’s website to grab his email but I noticed Matrix, and that was enough to completely derail me. The message never got sent. Instead, I found myself thinking about setting up my own Matrix server and going down the rabbit hole from there trying to understand it’s features and going over far too many setup guides.
I’m not sure if this is the same for other sysadmins. I end up noticing something interesting, opening one tab, and somehow ending up with a new service, a half-finished setup, and several hours missing from the day. A normal person would see a communication platform and move on. I see it and start wondering what it would take to host it ourselves.
At first it feels harmless. Just a bit of reading. Just checking how difficult it would be. Just seeing what the setup looks like. Then suddenly you are looking at DNS records, certificates, reverse proxies, ports, database choices, and federation settings. At some point the phrase “I’ll just have a look” stops meaning anything at all.
Matrix is a perfect example of this because it sits right in the middle of useful, technical, and slightly overcomplicated. It is one of those things that immediately makes you think, “I should probably try that.” Not because you need it, but because it looks like the sort of thing that I want to understand properly, and the best way to understand something properly is obviously to run your own instance at 10pm when you should really be doing something else.
There is always that voice in the back of your head saying, “Well, I could set that up.”
And so the original reason for sitting down vanishes. I went looking for a blog idea and found myself with a new side project instead. The joke is that the derailment itself became the story. I did not end up writing about something cool because I stayed focused. I ended up writing about it because I got distracted by something cool and followed it all the way down.