[HN Gopher] How to build a second brain as a software developer
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How to build a second brain as a software developer
Author : PretzelFisch
Score : 160 points
Date : 2021-11-11 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aseemthakar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aseemthakar.com)
| tompark wrote:
| Articles like this are nice for picking out ideas to incorporate
| into your own system. I try to avoid reading much "productivity
| porn" because it gets repetitive and what captures your attention
| is the novelty of an idea rather than its effectiveness.
|
| There's no system that works for everyone. You have to develop
| your own, and it will evolve because you change. I started
| journaling over 10 years ago - it was a simple "daily log" that I
| only wrote in occasionally. Over time I got more prolific and
| proficient at it. The structure of that journal became more
| complex, with different journals for day-job vs personal,
| multiple levels of summary vs detail planning/notes/ideas, and
| links between them. I've had to refactor that structure and the
| taxonomy of tags many times. And much like he describes here, I
| ended up adding cheatsheets and Q&A and dev templates. *There's
| no way I'd recommend this system to a beginner.* You have to
| build your own system according to where you're at in your
| journey.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > I try to avoid reading much "productivity porn" because it
| gets repetitive and what captures your attention is the novelty
| of an idea rather than its effectiveness.
|
| I keep seeing this term, but I have trouble understanding it. I
| open lots of productivity articles. It's not often that I make
| it past the third sentence because it's too general or not
| relevant to me.
| tompark wrote:
| You have a better filter than I do. :) I went through a phase
| where I gobbled up anything productivity related, and
| eventually had to stop myself because it was too distracting.
| I still want to believe someone can tell me a valuable trick
| that I don't know about. Often even just the headline or
| title of a productivity-oriented article or Kindle book seems
| to evoke an appealing idea that I'm curious about, and after
| reading the text it's not always clear to me that the idea
| would work or not without trying it. But now I've developed a
| system that I'm happy with, it's much easier for me to
| filter.
| cpb wrote:
| Having tuned in a few times to watch
| https://twitter.com/AdamLearnsLive on twitch, I was inspired to
| take notes throughout my development process. What I noticed of
| Adam13531's note taking was they wrote down every question that
| came to mind as they worked down the rabbithole of learning that
| is software development.
|
| For my own practices, I've added in a bit of an OODA loop
| process. My intent is to systematically balance between deciding
| and executing, focusing on accumulating knowledge towards
| achieving a goal.
|
| When I'm stuck, or dealing with unknowns, the brainstorming in
| each of Observe, Orient and Decide enable me to gain some flow.
|
| Later, I can observe where I had blindspots, or anchored to
| certain contexts or scopes. I'm noticing I could develop
| checklists to go through to avoid repeating those biases.
| cpb wrote:
| The second brain is emerging out of this. I keep these notes as
| a sibling project to all the software projects I'm interacting
| with.
|
| When shooting my shotgun for finding more references, what I've
| done/know/questioned about a piece of code shows up too.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It sounds like a lot of work and overhead for something that nine
| times out of ten I'll only need once and if I need it again, I'll
| default to Google anyway.
|
| What good is doing all this filing and organizing if it only
| serves you personally? It's like building and maintaining a
| cache, but with a high percentage of cache misses.
| Im_your_dada wrote:
| Build a second brain to enrich the company you work for?
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| It's often called "Confluence" (or something like that.)
|
| (No, I don't love it. It's just what's there.)
|
| The supermarket analogy glosses over the fact that supermarkets
| are designed to be accessible to many people. Documenting what
| everyone needs to know because you needed it for yourself
| anyway is a great way to make teams happy with you. Plus you
| get to demand the attention to ask lots of detailed questions
| "for our documentation" and often encounter and surface issues
| with internal processes.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| I built one enrich myself and to make my life easier, but I
| have little doubt my employer has benefited from it. I don't
| mind that form of "trickle up" economics.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Work for yourself and the rest is collateral.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Brings to mind Umberto Echo's "Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The
| Future of Books" at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2003 (PDF):
|
| > _WE HAVE THREE TYPES OF MEMORY. The first one is organic, which
| is the memory made of flesh and blood and the one administrated
| by our brain. The second is mineral, and in this sense mankind
| has known two kinds of mineral memory: millennia ago, this was
| the memory represented by clay tablets and obelisks, pretty well
| known in this country, on which people carved their texts.
| However, this second type is also the electronic memory of today
| 's computers, based upon silicon. We have also known another kind
| of memory, the vegetal one, the one represented by the first
| papyruses, again well known in this country, and then on books,
| made of paper._
|
| * https://www.bibalex.org/attachments/english/Vegetal_and_Mine...
| tconfrey wrote:
| Thats a cool take!
|
| I'm currently reading 'Remember' by Lisa Genova[0]. She points
| out that we have 'Temporal' memory for events in our lives,
| 'Semantic' memory for facts and figures (divorced from when we
| learned them), and 'muscle' memory for things we do with out
| body. So yeah, 3 types ;-)
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/54895704-remember
| jhylands wrote:
| Grepper?
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/grepper/amaaokahon...
| ziggus wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22276184
| vishnugupta wrote:
| tl;dr make a habit of systematically documenting. Use a good tool
| such as Roam Research (I use it and recommend)
| nenadst wrote:
| Missing from the list is Zettlr https://zettlr.com/ which is
| opensource, looks very nice and is built for the Zettelkasten
| method and has LaTeX integration.
|
| Was quite useful for some university classes.
| tconfrey wrote:
| This seems too heavyweight to me, specifically step 3 with all
| the data structures and templates. There's just no way capturing
| all that metadata is going to pay off for me. I see it as:
|
| 1) define your basic structure for capture (I also like PARA[1])
|
| 2) invest in the tools (for me, emacs/org-mode combined with the
| BrainTool browser extension - disclosure I built it[2])
|
| 3) understand your inflows and workflow.
|
| 4) just use search on your second brain for retrieval.
|
| [1] https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/
|
| [2] https://braintool.org/2021/05/15/Organizing-your-life-
| with-a...
| tom_wilde wrote:
| I recently took on a new, super complex project and can attest to
| Obsidian beyond useful. I've put all notes and info into it,
| everything.. and it's really paid off. I now see this process
| rather like unit testing whereby the structure of the notes
| mirrors your own thoughts but with a better, searchable memory.
| alphadenied wrote:
| I didn't see it so I'm recommending it.
|
| https://joplinapp.org/
|
| Use this with the encryption, sync to local filesystem, and with
| syncthing or similar and you can have an entire "second brain"
| tree of knowledge written in markdown. On your phone, on your
| laptop, pc at work, etc.... all for free because devs
| mabbo wrote:
| I recently read "Getting Things Done"[0] and began incorporating
| what I learned into my simple second brain. And the results are
| kind of ridiculously good for me.
|
| I built my whole system on a Google Sheet, but I'm experimenting
| with building myself an App instead- something I would never have
| been able to accomplish or even been willing to start if I didn't
| have this second brain helping me.
|
| The lessons I've learned from this:
|
| 1. Being pro-active on things instead of reactive makes
| everything easier. Each action takes less work because there's no
| worry or guilt associated with it. Just a small amount of
| planning to make myself pro-active is a worthy investment.
|
| 2. Putting things I need to remember into a system and then
| forgetting about them, trusting that my system has it under
| control, removes a huge cognitive load from me. I have more
| energy to use elsewhere.
|
| 3. Building a system that evolves to fit my needs, being flexible
| with myself, rather than trying to jam myself into someone else's
| system has made it work at all. That's why Google Sheets is
| awesome as a prototype tool for this.
|
| [0]https://gettingthingsdone.com/
| lioeters wrote:
| > I'm experimenting with building myself an App instead
|
| This approach has worked great for me. I have a local web app
| that's grown (and rewritten) over several years, which renders
| a folder of Markdown files into a view with navigation,
| interconnected links, dynamic components (like calendar or
| calculator), syntax highlight for code snippets..
|
| I love being able to write notes in natural language as well as
| code, and extend it with any feature I want.
|
| Edit: Also I have some shell commands that open, add, or search
| notes from the terminal.
| spdegabrielle wrote:
| https://tiddlywiki.com/ This has been solved
| judofyr wrote:
| I've tried to incorporate some of the ideas of the "second brain"
| and it didn't really give me that much. My lessons:
|
| 1. It's always super helpful to write things down. Taking notes
| from what I read/learn is a great way to verify that I understand
| it. It sharpens my thinking.
|
| 2. However, maintaining the "second brain" is _a lot_ work. It 's
| not only about "linking" together notes. You also need to
| maintain some consistency between them. I ended up spending a lot
| of time thinking about the _structure_ instead of actually
| thinking about the _content_.
|
| 3. Most of my notes/thoughts fall into two categories: (1) Either
| they are critical for something I'm actively working on or (2)
| it's just loose concepts that I'm toying with. For (1) I
| immediately end up playing with it in code -- which is far more
| concrete and tangible than notes. And for (2) it was rarely
| important to retain the knowledge accurately many weeks/months
| later.
|
| What I've ended up with is taking a lot of notes, but I hardly
| focus on organizing them.
| throwvirtever wrote:
| What I've found myself doing is taking a lot of notes, then
| when the moment arrives to organize them, I just delete them.
|
| I end up having to rebuild my (admittedly tiny) "second brain"
| from scratch from time to time, but at least I end up with
| stuff that's relevant now-ish, without having to bear the cost
| of a lot of long-term knowledge inventory.
|
| NOTE: This is not advice, and this approach would probably not
| work even for me if I was inclined to regret throwing things
| away.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yes, my notes are just a massive log file. I use it as a
| scratchpad whenever I do something.
| ar_lan wrote:
| I would recommend looking into the Zettelkasten ("slip box")
| system, then ("How to take smart notes" by Sonke Ahrens is a
| great read).
|
| Particularly to your point (2), the problem I've seen with most
| systems is they are _not_ simple to maintain. Contrast this
| with "Getting Things Done", which is practically the simplest
| productivity system I've ever used that accurately works, where
| you have only two chores:
|
| 1. Write down tasks as they come up 2. Flesh them out later
| with as little metadata as possible (typically, at most, a
| project + due date if necessary)
|
| The Zettelkasten mirrors this in a lot of ways. It has the
| advantage of re-writing your notes in your own words (your
| point (1)), but it is very simple to maintain. You re-write,
| make links to other notes in your existing setup, and you're
| done. Your notes should be as context-less as possible (which
| causes you to think further), and you should generally be able
| to relate it to GTD's daily "review" process.
|
| A big point of clarity is the Zettelkasten is against
| "organization" - everything falls into the box. Ahrens talks in
| depth about how folders, categories, and even tags can be very
| limiting - you think about the metadata more than the actual
| content, which gives us a headache to maintain. A system should
| be as friction-less as possible if we want to actually use it.
|
| Additionally, he does address your (3) to some extent, but it
| seems like you've figured out what these thoughts are, and
| resolved that they probably aren't worth fleshing out further
| (beyond maybe your proof-of-concept, fail-fast demo). I imagine
| if they are worthy ideas you probably would elaborate on them
| further.
|
| --
|
| I've been using it for a while now, and I can personally attest
| that it's been very helpful, especially as I've progressed into
| more architectural/design work, and less direct day-to-day
| coding.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Yes! and suggest "write things down" -> type thoughts in.
|
| Organising: suggest event in {iCal, Outlook}, can search by
| date.
|
| Other categories: suggest adding names of people to notes.
| Search (grep) for those extra names.
|
| Suggest scheduling future event {date/time, person} to delegate
| task.
|
| Suggest fractal recursion of self-sacrifice in Sierpinski
| Triangle, delegate out half the work, then half again. Say
| "thank you" to those who accept delegation; thank back to those
| who suggested ideas to you.
|
| Can parallelise {reading, writing, listening, speaking, typing,
| singing, doing going} e.g. reading code and singing music. Can
| double available brainpower.
|
| Thank you judofyr for your bug report; hope this workaround
| will help!
| agumonkey wrote:
| point 2 is a bit saying the brain2 is its own information
| system with tech debt and accidental complexity
| chris_st wrote:
| > _I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about the
| structure instead of actually thinking about the content._
|
| This is why wikis, which I originally thought were just the
| best things ever, seem to become useless over time.
|
| The Mac application Quiver [1] introduced me to the idea of
| categories, which can contain one layer of sub-category, and
| either categories or sub-categories can contain articles, which
| contain text. A really simple tree.
|
| This extremely simple structure is just enough to (A) contain
| everything I've thrown at it and (B) know where to look for
| something. And, you can make links from one article to another
| for when a cross-reference is good to have (but I do it very
| rarely).
|
| I now use Obsidian [2] which is more modern, not Mac only, as
| well as being much simpler to use than Quiver, using simple
| markdown.
|
| [1] https://happenapps.com
|
| [2] https://obsidian.md
| ssully wrote:
| I started using OneNote this year. I create a weekly "Note"
| where I throw all my notes in during a week. This includes a
| weekly ToDo checklist, a note section per meeting, and then
| random thoughts, code/log snippits, or whatever else I need.
|
| It's not perfect, but it's the best solution I've found so far.
| I've tried every note taking method out there and I always fall
| off after a few months. I think this is working for me because
| it has the quality of a general wiki, but I start fresh every
| week, so I don't have to worry about carrying over or linking
| "knowledge" for the most part.
| onefuncman wrote:
| I go back and forth between doing this on a daily or weekly
| cadence, but it's also the only thing I've found to keep
| being useful over time. I always get a wild hair to try and
| write Markdown or something but really I just end up writing
| text and it's fine. The most meta I ever get is adding
| additional keywords for me to search later.
| varispeed wrote:
| I am not going anywhere without my reMarkable 2. This is just
| crazy convenient tool for dumping thoughts and trying ideas.
| E.g. when I design something. I'd draw abstract boxes and other
| shapes, then add a new layer, make connections, another layer
| some notes. You can freely move things around or erase with a
| pen. I think my productivity gone up like 10x. I especially
| like the fact that I can just leave my laptop, sit somewhere
| quiet and just write and draw without distractions.
| yanis_t wrote:
| I still believe that all those "second brain" solutions lack an
| essential feature: spaced repetition, which I built my solution[
| _] around.
|
| Spaced repetition is a way to automate the reviewing schedule of
| the notes you took, which is essential if you want your knowledge
| to linger. It allows you to iterate and improve notes on the
| topics you probably know better now than when you wrote them.
|
| _ https://rekowl.com
| MrZongle2 wrote:
| I was disappointed that Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/) wasn't
| included in the app list.
|
| Having used both Evernote and OneNote, I've found Joplin to be a
| better choice, especially when I'm bouncing between platforms. It
| doesn't lock you to a particular ecosystem or cloud service, and
| the open source app is free for use.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm not affiliated with Joplin, I'm just a
| user.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I'm also a heavy Joplin user! The feature to sync with common
| file backup services (Dropbox, OneDrive, etc) is really useful,
| and doesn't feel like I'm locking my second brain into someone
| else's walled garden.
|
| Amazed it wasn't mentioned in this article.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I'm trying some stuff, sure.
|
| I'm wondering how to keep "slices of projects" aligned. Like,
| different things are in different repos - how to keep notes and
| additional files belonging to that, it ends up being a side
| hierarchy?
| dd444fgdfg wrote:
| I've always done something similar, but less structured and
| probably with less intent.
|
| Most of the problems we software developers encounter, we've
| solved before. So it's usually a case of recognizing the pattern
| of problems this is, and matching it to one you've solved before,
| and quickly being able to reference that previous solution.
| That's 95% of getting it done.
| Kaos-Industries wrote:
| I don't currently use it so can't comment on what features it has
| or doesn't have, but I find it interesting that Obsidian [1] is
| only given an honourable mention in this article when according
| to the Wayback Machine, its elevator pitch has been "A second
| brain, for you, forever" since before this article was published.
|
| [1] https://obsidian.md
| Havoc wrote:
| Not sure about second brain but I've come to the conclusion that
| a life long git repo is probably a good idea. eg keeping track of
| vaccines, medical history etc.
| safog wrote:
| Pretty graphs, but I wonder how it stands up to the tests of the
| real world.
|
| I've personally tried to use mind maps (a bit more general than
| solving technical problems) but gave up pretty quickly. I think
| part of the problem was the technology itself, mind map apps are
| mostly desktop only and the mobile experience navigating a 2D
| diagram is kind of clunky. The other part was just laziness,
| after building a mind map for an entire weekend I didn't even
| scratch the surface of what I wanted to achieve with it.
|
| Also I take objection to the fact that we go straight to Google
| for solutions, I check the existing codebase I'm working on, code
| search in my company's internal repo, code search github, then go
| to Stackoverflow / docs. So there's some amount of intermediate
| caching.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I moved from mind maps (I used and liked FreeMind) to indented
| outlines in plain text files when I realized I wasn't really
| losing anything to map the nodes to headings and the edges to
| sub-headings. I can capture the same relationships, keep it
| synced to everywhere via cloud storage, and I don't need
| special software beyond a text editor to look at or edit it.
|
| Now I just need to learn how to go back through them.
| raesene9 wrote:
| One thing I do , which combines the two is create the lists
| in Obsidian, then use the mind map plugin to visualize them.
| darkteflon wrote:
| This is an interesting idea, but I couldn't find Mind Map
| in the list of core plugins. Is this a community plug-in
| you're talking about?
| tconfrey wrote:
| Mobile is a challenge for all these PKM systems, esp capture
| but also retrieval. Luckily most knowledge work is still done
| with a big screen.
| alex_anglin wrote:
| Writing as someone who uses mind maps as part of my kit, I
| empathize with your comment. For my purposes, I've found that
| it helps to focus the map around a specific objective, project,
| etc. If I'm preparing a paper or presentation, it's helpful to
| see how the content can be structured, what can be pruned and
| what relationships between concepts there are. For project work
| or other objectives, I find them to be helpful in tracking and
| guiding learning.
|
| FWIW, I use iThoughts across a couple of different devices.
| It's been around for a while now and has a good mix of
| usability and functionality.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| After a few goes at it, I've mostly settled into using mind
| maps as a brainstorming / thought organizing construct and I
| transcribe the useful results to plain text for longer term
| search and storage.
| mgdv wrote:
| I've used lots of 'note' apps but ended up with 2 parts that work
| for me 1. A physical notebook for quick capture 2. A single
| markdown document which I search through or edit with Vim
|
| I have simple vim macro that prints today's date bound to a key.
| This makes it easy to write notes for that day. It's worked well
| for the last few years
| tconfrey wrote:
| Agreed, as I was mentioning in a separate thread, I use
| emacs/org-mode for text. With org you can layer on any other
| kind of process you like (tags, dates, TODOs, tables etc).
|
| I'd love to find some simple/automate-able way to integrate
| output from phone/notepad & stylus system.
| akouri wrote:
| I am constantly getting flummoxed by the PARA system. It ends up
| taking me more time trying to figure out the nuanced rules on
| where to put something (Projects/Areas and Areas/Resources are
| the most persnickety ones) that I often end up duplicating a
| concept and having two folders for it, one in each hierarchy. I'm
| still not sold on the PARA organizational method, but maybe
| there's something I'm missing.
| Vivtek wrote:
| I use a sloppy meld of Zettelkasten and PARA for this very
| reason. I used to get nervous about the subject ontology, and
| the link-to-anywhere aspect of ZK's tags fixed that for me.
| Plus having a unique ZK tag on every file means I can move
| subdirectories around to suit what I'm working on at the moment
| without any links breaking.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| My second brain keeps moving. For example, I have a great setup
| with Notability on an iPad. Except after a few months, I start
| typing stuff into Workflowy. No reason, I just reach for a
| different tool. A few months later I'm in a random text file and
| then back to Notability. I don't know why I do this. One thing
| that sorta helps is implementing the Jonny Decimal System so that
| all the different pieces can be indexed. But, I make it harder
| than it needs to be.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Hoenstly for me the issue is I want someone to create the
| "killer" note-taking app.
|
| I don't want to be restricted in how I am taking down
| information. Sometimes, I want to draw on a tablet, sometimes I
| want to write markdown, sometimes I want to do workflowy style
| outlining.
|
| I shouldn't be restricted in that way!
|
| So far, the only one I've been able to settle on for about 1.5
| years now is Obsidian.
| robofanatic wrote:
| Same thing happened to me with grocery list apps. I must have
| tried all the grocery list apps in the app store and have
| finally settled with the old-fashioned but the best app ---
| Paper & Pencil. For me the simplicity of paper and pencil and
| quick access of it during the actual shopping just beats all
| the cool features you get in a smartphone app.
| c17r wrote:
| I have this problem as well. The more I try to settle on a
| single system, the more my brain wants to run wild.
| yumaikas wrote:
| If there are other parts of your life that are negatively
| affected by this, you (and the person you're replying to)
| might want to look into ADHD.
|
| But I can also relate to never wanting to stick to one system
| for second-brain work indefinitely.
|
| I've made the mistake of trying to build my own second-brains
| more than I probably should.
| iratewizard wrote:
| Any particular reason why you use an iPad for note taking over
| a Wacom or remarkable?
| genghisjahn wrote:
| I bought an iPad for other reasons (I like the apple
| ecosystem in general). And I really liked the notability app.
| Being able to take hand written notes and have them be
| indexable is fantastic. I'm sure there are other ways to do
| it but that's the one I've settled on.
| tconfrey wrote:
| I've gone back and forth on the ideal platform over time. I
| loved the feel of iPad/pencil but it was too closed a
| system. I'm currently using a Galaxy Note with the pen for
| mobile and emacs/org on laptop. I type faster and more
| legibly than I write but you need that paper and pencil
| type feel for capturing thoughts IMO.
|
| BTW @genghisjahn given your tool usage I'd love to get your
| thoughts on BrainTool (which I've been pimping throughout
| this thread!) Since most of my inflow and things I need to
| keep track of come via browser and most of my notes are in
| orgmode text, BrainTool is the thing I built to bridge the
| two. I'm hoping its a more generally useful lightweight
| organizational tool which doesn't require the maintenance
| of other solutions and have been gathering informed
| feedback wherever I can.
| abeppu wrote:
| I keep seeing articles like this and I keep being a bit
| disappointed that they mostly adopt techniques that were
| developed for general knowledge workers ("personal knowledge
| management system") or ideas by/for writers or researchers, and
| don't seriously think about how to treat/manage code.
|
| A brain isn't just about knowledge; it's also a set of skills,
| capacities, patterns of behavior. Software is an area it's
| possible to capture capacities in the form of code that actually
| does stuff. This article makes brief mention of code snippets,
| but only really to remark on the kinds of metadata that one
| should keep to find them later.
|
| What I have yet to see a satisfying description of, and what I
| sometimes try to work towards myself, is a mashup of a library
| with a knowledge management system, where notes link to code, and
| both go together in a common repo. However, depending on the
| kinds of things one stores, the software/library side can stumble
| over some challenges, and I haven't quite figured out how to keep
| the overhead spent on maintaining it low. One might have small
| pieces of code in many languages, or different versions of the
| same language (e.g. making notes about macros in scala 2.x vs
| scala 3), and notes made at different times might incidentally
| become dependent on differing specific versions of library (e.g.
| ideas in statistical analysis that use pandas).
| Arcsech wrote:
| I've been thinking along some similar lines myself recently,
| that I'd like to have notes that can link to code in some kind
| of semi-durable way (i.e. as resilient as possible to changes),
| be able to run code snippets in a variety of languages, etc.,
| and the only things I've found that are able to do this are:
|
| 1) Emacs with Org Mode, which is very powerful but has a
| learning curve like a brick wall, even if you already know
| emacs. Also nearly impossible to use with anything _except_
| emacs (yes, there are mobile /web apps that understand standard
| org syntax... which doesn't help with any customizations you
| make, which is like half the point of org mode).
|
| 2) Glamorous Toolkit, which is based on Pharo Smalltalk and is
| easier to use than org mode, but less featureful, much newer
| (== smaller community, less support), and has many of same
| problems (i.e. can't easily use it on any non-desktop
| platform).
|
| It's looking more and more like I'm going to have to build
| something myself for this.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| Nah, he should have stopped with the first diagram.
|
| Google plus the internet is your second brain and is the optimal
| approach for almost everyone. This heavy approach seems like make
| work that will waste time, and the data will rot, leading to
| calcified and inaccurate knowledge.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Google plus the internet only works if you're learning about
| things that are:
|
| 1. Public (if it's non-public systems, information, etc. that
| you are learning then Google can't help you). 2. and either
| shallow or of one of a small subset of areas that has in-depth
| discussion online.
|
| There are plenty of situations in knowledge work where Google
| will not cut it.
| x0hm wrote:
| Lost me here - "Tiago Forte (the original creator of the second
| brain concept)"
|
| Ugh, no. No, no, no. Tiago isn't doing anything original. Tiago
| has never done anything original. This isn't Tiago's thing.
| Olreich wrote:
| The best approach is to not build a knowledge management system
| for yourself until you need it. When you've forgotten something
| you need a few times, maybe it's time to set up a "common notes"
| file that you can check first for those things that won't stick.
| Then when that gets unwieldy, maybe split it into a folder of
| organized notes with a grep or fuzzy search in front of it (or
| one of those note-taking apps). When that stops working for you,
| pull out bigger guns and build something that works specifically
| for how you use it.
|
| By waiting until you actually need it, you skip a lot of the work
| in maintaining a knowledge base you don't use, and you only build
| out the bits you actually need, instead of wasting a bunch of
| effort on things that sound nice, but won't actually help.
| thrower123 wrote:
| My second brain is the 400 browser tabs that I have open
| bodge5000 wrote:
| You might have meant this as a joke, but I honestly think this
| is a better way of doing things than a rigourously designed
| system of organisation and workflows and all that.
|
| There are a million ways to approach this kind of thing, and
| whilst browser tabs aren't nessecarily the best way, they're
| certainly up there
| thrower123 wrote:
| Oh, I'm absolutely not kidding. I've tried to do the OneNote
| thing, or get into org-mode, or manage collections of
| bookmarks. Too much overhead, not enough value to justify the
| work.
|
| So I have a browser window per "thing" that I'm dealing with,
| with a whole bunch of tabs, and when I'm done with the thing,
| the browser gets closed and the tabs go away.
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| You should try Amna (https://getamna.com)!
|
| It wraps around this exact workflow, saves your tabs, and
| can manage your browser windows. You may have to login to
| Chrome to get your bookmarks, tabs and stuff.
| brw wrote:
| This is also my exact workflow. Currently at 260 tabs after
| an OS reset but I've gone up to 1-2k before (though that
| was a particularly bad time for me). Every tab or bookmark
| manager I've tried just didn't feel right, too much
| friction, too little return, eventually forgotten.
|
| I feel like the tool I'm looking for doesn't exist, but I
| don't really know what I'm looking for either.
| tconfrey wrote:
| You should definitely check out BrainTool
| (https://braintool.org)
| dominicjj wrote:
| org-mode. Nuff said.
| wrs wrote:
| I learned about computers and worked in the software industry
| before nearly all of the boxes on that diagram even existed. This
| was only 30 years ago! If you needed information you got it from
| coworkers, source code, vendor documentation, or the library. Of
| course we had "second brains" to cope, called notebooks and
| filing cabinets (and notes in text files).
|
| It's kind of sad that instead of using the Internet to vastly
| expand the reach and effectiveness of that existing system, we
| seem to have thrown it away so we need articles like this to try
| to rebuild it. Rather than developing our own thoughts we search
| for someone else's thoughts. (And I'm not being holier-than-thou;
| my first stop is Google and Stack Overflow now too!)
| spiderice wrote:
| > These categories are all nested. Tasks are nested under
| Projects which fall under Areas which fall under Resources, with
| Archives serving as the catch-all category.
|
| This article got me reading about PARA. But it seems like this
| sentence is very much the opposite of what the creator of PARA
| says to do. Sounds like there shouldn't be any nesting of
| categories: https://fortelabs.co/blog/p-a-r-a-ii-operations-
| manual/
| betwixthewires wrote:
| While these are great concepts, I find it to be an
| overcomplication for my needs. When we build systems of any kind
| it's nice to imagine the ways in which they make our lives
| easier, and we always underestimate the required maintenance of
| our systems and the ways in which they come to constrain our
| thinking and action.
|
| I have a pretty simple organizational structure for information:
| I keep text files on ongoing projects and ideas. I think on ones
| that are on the back burner and update my notes on them when I
| have something compelling come to mind, and the forefront ones or
| ones that are related to maintenance I keep accessible, usually
| on my desktop or always open in my text editor. It's a bit of a
| disorganized system but it is just the right level of complexity.
| I'm the kind of person who knows which pair of pants on the floor
| that I left my wallet under last night and so a good portion of
| organization exists in my head and I work better that way. I'm
| always on the lookout for new organizational tools, but a huge
| criteria for them is that they require little to no overhead or
| maintenance.
|
| I do rely on online search a little too much, I often forget to
| store information I find and might need later and instead store
| my google-fu queries in my head, and because of that often times
| I cannot find it again later (because online search as a tool is
| degrading as we speak) and this article is a good reminder that I
| cannot rely on external tools like that that I have no say in
| them continuing to work the same way.
| dragosbulugean wrote:
| All the tools you mentioned are nice.
|
| However, none are built for software developers. If you want to
| know why, ask yourself -- does anything here make me feel special
| as a developer? My guess is the response is "No".
|
| I'm the founder of archbee.io, and although it's an early stage
| product, I built it for engineers -- and you can see that by the
| features: architecture diagrams, GitHub integration, markdown
| shortcuts, very speedy, API docs with GraphQL and OpenAPI, custom
| domain hosting, Mermaid diagrams and more.
|
| Please check it out and let me know what you thought!
|
| :)
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| This looks very cool
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| 2nd brain = 2nd job.
|
| Here is my flow. Google. If its really good/unique and I am
| afraid that I won't find it again, then I bookmark it, and if I
| think it will actually disappear from the internet, then I will
| scrape the content for a 2nd brain.
|
| Now whether Google is best depends. Sometimes specialty engines
| would be better.
| going_to_800 wrote:
| You guys should try Fibery.io
| throwamon wrote:
| Never heard of it before. I love this:
| https://fibery.io/anxiety
| robofanatic wrote:
| time required to curate a local pantry of information is just too
| high and mostly benefits decline overtime unless that information
| is very complex to remember and so specific to your domain that
| you wont find a quick solution online.
|
| IMO Search Engine is the food pantry. local knowledge
| repositories are good for any domain specific knowledge thats
| really hard to find elsewhere online
| raesene9 wrote:
| The problem I've found, with relying on online search based
| knowledge, is the level of bitrot that affects on-line
| resources.
|
| My technique to combat that has been combining my own notes and
| making use of Pocket to have copies of resources that I think
| are interesting.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| Something that became obvious to me after reading through this is
| how variant individual learning can be, super interesting to me
| generally.
|
| Very few of the premises used in the article are how I solve
| problems or gather information as an engineer, either now or in
| the fledging times of the start of my career 15 years ago.
| Consequently, the second brain concept seems less useful for me
| at least at a glance.
|
| I thought it was peculiar that in the initial flowchart of
| "problem requiring information" - there is no mention of RTFS (I
| use that acronym affectionately here), which is probably the most
| useful skill I have learned in my time building and maintaining
| software projects. It may be an innocent omission and its
| admittedly a steep initial learning curve, but I think it it
| amortizes incredibly well over the span of a whole career.
|
| Not accepting "black magic" anywhere in your stack and
| challenging yourself to understand why something is breaking can
| certainly lead to rabbit holes, but avoiding it altogether
| introduces a significant opportunity cost, in my view.
|
| Maybe trying to strike a balance there can dodge the information
| asymmetry/inefficiency issue established in the premise of the
| article. Really interesting read, whatever the truth may be.
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