Personally, creating walls or partitions never did me too much good. I always try to have a system that’s general enough so that I can put my hobbies side by side with my work stuff. To do that I have two main types of notes, the more “encyclopedia-like” things and journal/mini-reports.
The encyclopedia-like notes are my personnal wikipedia, but connected to my own perspective and experiences. So I could have a note about “Apache Kafka” that lists the tutorials I liked, the projects where I used it in the past, etc. All of the ways my experience connects with Kafka.
The journal/mini-reports talk about activities rather than things. If I spend 2-3 days integrating Kafka into a new setup, for instance, I would make a note called “Installing Kafka inside project -----” and keep track of things there, the bugs I solved, the stack overflow posts I used, etc.
The two are very complementary: I could link to the Apache Kafka note in my journal, and my Apache Kafka note could have a list of all the relevant journal entries.
What’s nice about this system is that it is pretty general and I’ve been able to make my notes about hobbies and work in the same vault.
I find that there is one important nuance that is not obvious when working with more technical fields like IT. It’s about seeing the difference between propositional notes and technical/factual notes.
A propositional note could be something like “Unbridled capitalism unavoidably leads to oligarchies”. It invites discussions, conversation. Maybe you want to link it to opposing propositions, or supporting propositions. Zettelkasten is extremely good at this.
For technical stuff I find that propositional note-taking is not that useful. The types of informations I want to recall is more like this: “How did I solve that bug last time I played with Kafka during project ------?”. To do that, I put more time to archive information under the right tags so that I can retrieve it later. This is how I came up with the “encyclopedia notes” and “journal notes” that I talked about above. The encyclopedia notes are the tags, the journal notes are the meat, and I use both to recall information later.
Cheers