Jun-05-2022, 12:59 PM
I posted to the mods forum recently about returning after my long break but thought I'd post here too. I took a break from the forum because of mental health stuff, then had life stuff happen, then quit my job, then more life stuff, and it's been life stuff for over a year with no time for a job yet. During this time I barely coded at all, after ~15 years of never going more than two weeks (usually no more than a couple of days) without a fairly substantial amount of coding.
I still haven't gotten back into the swing of things, though remains Python what I reach for first. I've actually been distracted by something else though that I wanted to share. I discovered mind gardening and then networked thinking more generally. I've been using (private) Google Docs for a few years, but it was kludgy.
I tried to get some open source wiki software running a few weeks before discovering the mind gardening article but basically gave up. But then! I discovered Roam Research and fell in love with it - it's not just like a wiki, it's like a wiki that is extremely easy to modify quickly on the fly. I had meant to look into networked thinking tooling more before investing in a particular tool but it was addictive. I'm now busy moving to Obsidian, and I'm paying a cost for letting my Roam graph build for so long.
I keep expecting to be more into coding than I am, but it's because I've had legit distractions. Once I get momentum with Obsidian, I'll re-learn Python faster and learn new things faster. That said, I've been doing therapy 2x/week to deal with CPTSD and I do a lot of prep and then integration after. So for anyone curious, I use the same tooling for managing tech knowledge and also processing serious trauma. I love it and cannot imagine going back. (Another reason I've failed to get back into coding is that I kept having false starts where something would distract me and I'd forget what I'd recently re-learned, which felt like wasted time. With networked notes I expect this to be less of an issue going forward.)
I basically just wanted to give that update, but if anyone has anything interesting to share about note-taking, I'd certainly be curious! I've seen colleagues who use regular text files and Trello, but I don't personally know anyone else using networked thinking.
P.S. For anyone totally unfamiliar with me, I was active on the forum from around 2005 through October 2020. In 2009 I became a mod. In 2013 I graduated from university and became a software engineer. In my last role, I did backend and data engineering (with Scala, Python, SQL, and Bash), though I'd like to learn Javascript for practical reasons. (I say this after literally a decade of hoping JS would be replaced wholesale with something better 😢)
I still haven't gotten back into the swing of things, though remains Python what I reach for first. I've actually been distracted by something else though that I wanted to share. I discovered mind gardening and then networked thinking more generally. I've been using (private) Google Docs for a few years, but it was kludgy.
I tried to get some open source wiki software running a few weeks before discovering the mind gardening article but basically gave up. But then! I discovered Roam Research and fell in love with it - it's not just like a wiki, it's like a wiki that is extremely easy to modify quickly on the fly. I had meant to look into networked thinking tooling more before investing in a particular tool but it was addictive. I'm now busy moving to Obsidian, and I'm paying a cost for letting my Roam graph build for so long.
I keep expecting to be more into coding than I am, but it's because I've had legit distractions. Once I get momentum with Obsidian, I'll re-learn Python faster and learn new things faster. That said, I've been doing therapy 2x/week to deal with CPTSD and I do a lot of prep and then integration after. So for anyone curious, I use the same tooling for managing tech knowledge and also processing serious trauma. I love it and cannot imagine going back. (Another reason I've failed to get back into coding is that I kept having false starts where something would distract me and I'd forget what I'd recently re-learned, which felt like wasted time. With networked notes I expect this to be less of an issue going forward.)
I basically just wanted to give that update, but if anyone has anything interesting to share about note-taking, I'd certainly be curious! I've seen colleagues who use regular text files and Trello, but I don't personally know anyone else using networked thinking.
P.S. For anyone totally unfamiliar with me, I was active on the forum from around 2005 through October 2020. In 2009 I became a mod. In 2013 I graduated from university and became a software engineer. In my last role, I did backend and data engineering (with Scala, Python, SQL, and Bash), though I'd like to learn Javascript for practical reasons. (I say this after literally a decade of hoping JS would be replaced wholesale with something better 😢)