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Obsidian notes5/1/2023 Over time, things I’m interested in start to emerge this way, and topics grow deeper and more detailed, with branches of pages spinning off from it. I can see all the times I’ve used the words “chaos engineering” in other notes, even if I haven’t created formal links using ]. What if I didn’t have the foresight to link to Chaos Engineering from an article I read? Obsidian also tracks unlinked mentions as well. Interestingly, if I go to the Chaos Engineering page, I can also see all the instances I’ve linked to it from other notes: Over time, I end up with a page like this one on Chaos Engineering that is a consolidation of what I’ve learned. ![]() If I click on that new link, it creates a page for it. Each time I do that, I try to identify key concepts and create backlinks for them, which in Obsidian just means typing ], with a topic between double brackets. Then, I process notes iteratively, first restating things into my own words and then creating my own notes about concepts I’ve learned. That hasn’t been my experience, because I forget many things I consume shallowly. They’ve read the thing, they’ve highlighted passages from the thing, and now they think they’ve learned the thing. When trying to learn something, many people stop at this phase. Here’s an example of my notes during a presentation (called In the kitchen - a sprinkle of fire and chaos by Ana Medina, about chaos engineering). Then, I import data from Readwise to Obsidian using a process I describe in more detail here.įor now, suffice it to say that all these notes and highlights end up in Obsidian for processing. I initially capture my notes on them in different ways, but they all lead back to using Readwise, which I use as a collector and sorter of all these notes. I consume a lot of content, and in different formats: articles, books, videos, presentations, podcasts are all great sources of free education. Luckily, Obsidian is pretty great at this. Remaining relevant in tech pretty much requires that you learn a lot, learn quickly, and enjoy the hell out of it. However, I want to point out that Obsidian itself is free for personal use, and if mobile access, cloud sync, and publishing your notes online aren’t important to you, you can really go a long way with using it for free. All up, I’m giving Obsidian about US $16 a month. I use Obsidian Publish to make some of my notes publicly available on a custom domain directly from my vault, as an experiment in learning in public that’s gone pretty well so far. Just for overkill, I also use Obsidian Sync as another backup and as the easiest way to get access to my Obsidian vault on my iPad Pro and my Android mobile. I keep my main Obsidian vault in a Dropbox for extra version control and as a backup. I have multiple Obsidian vaults, and each of them is a version-controlled Git repository, hosted on GitHub. Here are some ways I use Obsidian at work that might help you understand why Obsidian is my daily driver. I have no affiliation with the Obsidian team, and in fact I’m an investor of a competing product. Recently, my note-taking and personal knowledge management tool of choice has been Obsidian.md. It’s naive to think we won’t one day forget some skills we’ve learned, even if we were using them daily at one point. I’d argue, though, that most people who work in a field as fast-moving as tech are knowledge workers too. I consider myself a knowledge worker: a significant part of my job depends on how quickly I learn new technologies and how clearly I can impart what I’ve learned to others. Currently, though, I’m a Developer Advocate at k6.io, which means a significant part of my job now is sharing with people what I’ve learned. My job for several years has been to make sure that applications are prepared to withstand traffic from many users accessing it, usually by writing code to simulate that traffic before it’s released to real users. ![]() My background is in software performance testing. ![]() I’ll admit, due to my job description, I may be in a better position than most to take advantage of note-taking in a professional context. But there’s not much said about its use outside of the academe. ![]() Note-taking and personal knowledge management get talked about in academic circles, by both students and teachers.
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