personal_notes VS til

I keep a relatively large amount of notes (1), which are fundamental to my learning.

My notes are essentially books in markdown format, which I can open with the editor/IDE I use when working on any project.

My opinions are:

- the vast majority of the effort is spent on cataloguing knowledge when adding new notes (that is, keeping each book consistently structured); this is something that no tool can do, and as a consequence, any tool will probably do equal.

- a consequence of the cataloguing effort is that the brain better remembers the topics stored.

- searching is where the other effort goes; I've found that as long as the books are consistently structured, and one puts a bit of effort to make concepts easily findable, a textual search does well. probably, a tool to do fulltext search may help in some cases, but I rarely find the need

For things that require rote memorization (say, System-V x64 calling conventions), I use Anki.

I take notes almost only for computer/science related stuff. If I had to catalogue diverse topics, I'd probably just use subdirectories.

(1): https://github.com/64kramsystem/personal_notes/tree/master/t...

It seems that this HN post got some interest, so here's my TIL repository: https://github.com/saveriomiroddi/personal_notes :)

https://til.codeinthehole.com/

It's built using Hugo and hosted on Github Pages. Hugo is good fit for collecting TILs as it makes it easy to create tag pages and link to related content. Source: https://github.com/codeinthehole/til/

As Simon notes, writing TILs drastically lowers the barrier to publishing something online. I see publishing in increasing sizes of granularity as a pipeline (notes → tweets → TILs → blog posts) where each prior step helps inform the next step. To paraphrase a British proverb: look after the TILs and the blog posts look after themselves.