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notes
A zero dependency shell script that makes it really simple to manage your text notes. (by nickjj)
Since about 2001 I used YYYY-MM.txt plain text files and have a shell script to help create notes in the most friendly way I could think of from the command line at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.
Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details. I still use it today.
But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kubernetes, Kustomize / Helm, EKS, various cloud hosting details (networking, etc.), Terraform and ton of super useful commands / context. Details you for sure want recorded for later.
For this type of info I've been building up a knowledge base with https://obsidian.md/. It's really nice and I highly recommend it. It's been working well for keeping things reasonably categorized without wasting a lot of time on the details around keeping links and tags up to date. It also has Vim mode that's good enough where day to day writing feels natural.
I use Obsidian[1] pointing at a local directory of markdown files which is also synced across my devices via Syncthing[2]. Works flawlessly across my various Android/Fedora/Windows/etc devices. Cost: $0.0/year.
I don't really use any Obsidian plugins. Obsidian has good navigation, search, and markdown processing (e.g. LaTeX, code syntax highlighting). It's just as easy as opening a new file in $EDITOR, except its markdown & synced across all my devices.
[1] - https://obsidian.md/
[2] - https://syncthing.net/
Since about 2001 I used YYYY-MM.txt plain text files and have a shell script to help create notes in the most friendly way I could think of from the command line at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.
Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details. I still use it today.
But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kubernetes, Kustomize / Helm, EKS, various cloud hosting details (networking, etc.), Terraform and ton of super useful commands / context. Details you for sure want recorded for later.
For this type of info I've been building up a knowledge base with https://obsidian.md/. It's really nice and I highly recommend it. It's been working well for keeping things reasonably categorized without wasting a lot of time on the details around keeping links and tags up to date. It also has Vim mode that's good enough where day to day writing feels natural.
I wrote a tool specifically for this, mostly inspired by the Snippets tool at Google. I've been publishing my weekly log in it every week for almost three years:
https://whatgotdone.com/michael/2021-12-03
The code is all open source if you're interested in playing around with it:
https://github.com/mtlynch/whatgotdone
I love this! And have been doing something like this for years.
The zero-effort part is key in my IME: if it's not zero effort, it won't stick. And if it doesn't stick, you won't reap the nonlinear long term benefits. There's the obvious benefit of magically reaching into the past and remembering things. But the hidden power that surprised me was the day-to-day experience of clearing cognitive clutter by typing things out in a place that I trust won't get lost.
Shameless plug: two years ago I hacked together a little node script to give my pile of markdown files a more friendly UI than grep: it would pass them through pandoc and massage the DOM and slap a a bit of JS on it. I've been using it everyday since and it's become my favorite productivity hack. I'm currently in the process of rewriting that ole hack in Go to make it more stable and easy to distribute (and to learn Go!): https://github.com/amirkdv/codex
This! This is the way! I envy your coworkers. This practice is also one of the things that help me overcome chronic procrastination. For every project/feature/bugfix/etc.. I start with such a document in which I try to pin down exactly that. The goals (and explicitly calling out non-goals to fight off Feature Creep Frank[1] from the get go), the whys and the hows. The hows should be as detailed as possible. The hows/whys may be getting updated (with history, for this, I just strike through and add a date for the change, nothing fancy like revision history in the storage media). And whenever I feel like slacking off, the detailed tasks in these documents offer me a way out of a rut.
[1] https://github.com/zsoltika/hacknot/blob/master/hacknot.md#f...