Note that a wider knowledge base can lead to a deeper understanding simply by having more possible connections between ideas. Our brains love connecting the dots.
Generally this is true, but I think you are being dismissive by throwing this truism at his note taking attempt. The point of keeping a personal wiki, is tonote the things that has come to his attention and not to forget it and to come back to it later. Writing things down gives it a concrete form. Sometime I even force myself to write down things that I read and that is a reasonable cure for my binge reading procrastination. Even if you think it as just a glorified bookmark manager, it is more useful than your browser's bookmark manager . Many people who do not maintain a wiki may not realise that knowledge is incrementally gained and by having a wiki (or any place really) to note these things makes the process transparent and recallable.
A vast superficial knowledge, along with a good memory, the ability of making meaningful connections between far away domains is a scarcely distributed skillset and a quite valuable one in today's Western world.
I'd like to believe this were true. Personally I've found it very difficult to find paid work that allows me to exercise even a fraction of my general knowledge. My best results so far have been with underfunded startups who are trying to do too much with too little - they need people who can tackle a different challenge every week, because they can't afford to hire specialists. But it's not a spectacular way to build a career.
Of course there are other kinds of value than monetary.
Yes, but on the other side there is a chance to gain knowledge on a higher level, because of comparing different things and finding the common patterns. But this only really works well when those things are similar enough to have common patterns.
And from experience I think it's true that at some point one should move from being a jack of all trades to become a master of some things. But as big as the world has become today, the road to this has become even longer. I think today it's not so unusual anymore to search some years or longer for your calling to master.
Knowing a little about a lot of things allows you to generalize over them and learn new things faster.
For example, if you have dabbled in C++, Java and Python you are better placed to learn a new language than if you have exclusively used one of them. Even if your knowledge of that goes way deeper.
Not true. So if you are a JS developer who knows React and Vue you could learn Angular (same kind of thing) or learn Haskell (different) or Systems programming (different), and I assert the latter two things would deepen your knowledge of JS more than learning the library because they allow you to see JS through another lens.
I enter my email in the "getting started" field, click "getting started" and then never received a sign-up email. Anyone else having trouble with this?
I've had great luck using notion to start developing a personal wiki, seems like we're going to see more of Notion -> JAMStack work in the near future.
This is really cool. One of the reasons I don’t use Notion is I love how portable raw markdown is as a format and that I can use Sublime Text with Vim mode to edit everything (which is super fast unlike Notion).
I also built a few workflows to retrieve information to both edit and consume my wiki easier.
HTML is possible through a tag, but adding Links is just faster then writing it down. Managing it through hierarchical/multiple tags makes it even more easier.
There's a bookmarklet for the browser and I can share it on Android through Tasker and autoshare
I simply use a github repository but instead of being "everything I know" is kind of "everything I'm (actively) learning and can't find (minimalistic compiled) elsewhere". I have less will to document stuff that I already know or stuff that is easy to find in a palatable form.
Its interesting to see how people reinvent this conept continually. This is cool and certainly useful for slices of knowledge, but I think sadly technology is still not at a point where this would be universally feasible.
Links and text is lightweight and searchable but rather fragile (because of external dependencies) and incomplete. I use a filesystem for this purpose, but that would be still cubersome to effectively share - I wish we'de be at a point where hundreds of gigabytes/mixed form of media are easier and faster to sync and manage.
If I understand the author’s motivations, they are likely to have written and maintain this largely for their own use. I also keep a lot of notes about things I know and information I may want to refer back to, but, I don’t have my notes in a form that would be of much use to other people.
Really cool project. How do you differentiate between things that have been too internalized/are too obvious and things that are worth writing down? i.e. you don't have a section for basic algebra, because I can only assume you know that pretty well.
This is pretty comprehensive. How do you manage to capture learning across devices? For instance when I find some interesting link on my mobile, I read and save it to Pocket but I don't like typing on mobile so I don't capture the gist of it like I do on desktop. And now my Pocket items are so bloated that I have no idea how to organize.
I try to process everything on my macbook as I am much faster on it. So usually I send myself stuff to Telegram’s saved messages and process it later on mac.
I also use Ulysses on the phone in cases I need to make quick edits. More details here:
It's an awesome git client (event git-lfs) with an editor + preview engine built in, it also provides everything iOS can offer regarding 3rd party app/scripting integrations.
This is very cool. I am working on a similar project since past 2 weeks but also plan on providing the resources(at least those which I think worked very well for me) to readers. It is kind of a no-nonsense guide to learning anything. Very inspired by this. Thanks
Back when I was getting my degree and was reading & writing a lot I got really enamored with the idea having an extensive repository of everything I had read or learned or simply come across and found interesting.
There are all sorts of software packages designed to facilitate this, I used DevonThink for a fairly long time. However, it never turned out to be nearly as useful or fulfilling as I had imagined going in and truth be told I just couldn't maintain the self discipline that the curation requires.
So now I have this ginormous unused data store that I don't want to mess with but nevertheless still can't bring myself to delete.
Using a system of personal knowledge management (PKM) has been a huge boon for me. Just the act of jotting down all my ideas whenever I have them (Google Keep), then dedicating time to structuring/curating them into an organized format (Microsoft OneNote), and then being able to quickly access them in the future has helped my retention and creativity immensely. I just see patterns I never would have recorded or remembered otherwise. Sometimes it's a pain to dedicate a few hours every weekend to structuring all this information but I've found the long term benefit to far outweigh that cost.
Aren't you worried that google or Microsoft will deprecate your personal library? Google isn't exactly good at keeping non-gmail programs in good shape and my original MS One note files simply do not open anymore. Do you at least keep a plain text file somewhere?
It just seems like such a delicate choice of software to use for something like your personal knowledge. Certainly a wiki of some kind would be better?
I had a similar thought to this. I was shocked that he was willingly and publicly making proprietary software such a part of his life, and I thought of emacs org-mode, but maybe he doesn't like that sort of workflow. I've only barely used org myself, but I've seen a lot of thoughtbot talks and such that make me feel like bringing it up in case someone goes farther with it than I did.
Interesting. After reading Siver's writing on this topic[1], and your comment, this is really something to get into.
Every once and awhile I'll re-read something that I "should" have retained and internalised (by my own standards) but that hadn't sunk into my long term memory.
Great work!
I did something with a similar approach, although it's just kind of a knowledge base for myself build with Jekyll and a little search function, called "My Sysadmin Cheatsheet": https://docs.j7k6.org
Did it mainly for myself, because I was tired of having to google for the same problem more than once, but decided to make it public to kind of share my knowledge with others.
I'm not familiar with Jekyll. How much work was it to get your site up and running besides the posts' content?
I'd love to be able to run the same kind of site you are - a series of markdown posts with a live search frontend. Did you use a specific tutorial to do that? Is there a Jekyll live-search plugin or whatever it uses?
About 10 years ago I wrote wiki software called Pylowiki (Pylons/Python) which I still use occasionally to write notes that don't really fit in my personal blog.
121 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadOf course there are other kinds of value than monetary.
https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html
And from experience I think it's true that at some point one should move from being a jack of all trades to become a master of some things. But as big as the world has become today, the road to this has become even longer. I think today it's not so unusual anymore to search some years or longer for your calling to master.
For example, if you have dabbled in C++, Java and Python you are better placed to learn a new language than if you have exclusively used one of them. Even if your knowledge of that goes way deeper.
Thanks for sharing.
This is my friend's wiki which also deserves some attention I think.
I build a custom toolchain to generate it.
All the content is stored in Notion (which is the fastest way I found to write and edit content).
I wrote a Go program (https://github.com/kjk/blog) to convert that to html and deploy as a static site to Netlify, on their generous free plan.
I also generate the rest of the website (mostly blog) from content in Notion.
Since the code is open source, others can adopt it.
It wasn't clear to me how the data was exported, but it seems the author built his own library: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad2...
It appears that you can also export the majority of your data as shown here: https://www.notion.so/Export-to-PDF-or-markdown-ebb66c27de32...
I also built a few workflows to retrieve information to both edit and consume my wiki easier.
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow
HTML is possible through a tag, but adding Links is just faster then writing it down. Managing it through hierarchical/multiple tags makes it even more easier.
There's a bookmarklet for the browser and I can share it on Android through Tasker and autoshare
https://github.com/archimodels/learning-notes
Links and text is lightweight and searchable but rather fragile (because of external dependencies) and incomplete. I use a filesystem for this purpose, but that would be still cubersome to effectively share - I wish we'de be at a point where hundreds of gigabytes/mixed form of media are easier and faster to sync and manage.
https://lobste.rs/s/ord0rg/does_anyone_else_keep_their_own_k...
If I understand the author’s motivations, they are likely to have written and maintain this largely for their own use. I also keep a lot of notes about things I know and information I may want to refer back to, but, I don’t have my notes in a form that would be of much use to other people.
Before starting this wiki, I already got some experience in organizing and visualizing knowledge in some way with the Learn Anything project.
Which I find true too, modulo obvious conventions like bin/ doc/ public/ etc.
[1] https://github.com/azappella/knowledge
[2] https://github.com/RichardLitt/meta-knowledge
What inspired you to do this?
[1] https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/resources/everything-i-know
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/looking-back/2017
[1]: https://www.jerrysbrain.com
I also use Ulysses on the phone in cases I need to make quick edits. More details here:
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/other/wiki-workflow
It's an awesome git client (event git-lfs) with an editor + preview engine built in, it also provides everything iOS can offer regarding 3rd party app/scripting integrations.
There are all sorts of software packages designed to facilitate this, I used DevonThink for a fairly long time. However, it never turned out to be nearly as useful or fulfilling as I had imagined going in and truth be told I just couldn't maintain the self discipline that the curation requires.
So now I have this ginormous unused data store that I don't want to mess with but nevertheless still can't bring myself to delete.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780065
It just seems like such a delicate choice of software to use for something like your personal knowledge. Certainly a wiki of some kind would be better?
Every once and awhile I'll re-read something that I "should" have retained and internalised (by my own standards) but that hadn't sunk into my long term memory.
[1] https://sivers.org/dj
Did it mainly for myself, because I was tired of having to google for the same problem more than once, but decided to make it public to kind of share my knowledge with others.
I don't suppose you have your source available with a free license?
EDIT: wait, I see it: https://github.com/j7k6/docs.j7k6.org
I'd love to be able to run the same kind of site you are - a series of markdown posts with a live search frontend. Did you use a specific tutorial to do that? Is there a Jekyll live-search plugin or whatever it uses?
Demo of it here: https://www.foxhop.net