Can someone share a workflow they use for taking notes as a developer?
I’ve been reading about the zettelkasten system and some other but have a bit of information overwhelm.
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What makes developers different from other people who take text notes?
What do you want to save in your vault?
What would you like to get out from your notes?
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@rsdimitrov I’m not sure there is a difference because I haven’t used any sort of knowledge management system before.
I’ve just started taking notes and have noticed the folder structure I’m using is already a bit unwieldy and I can see how it can get too crazy.
for example here are some things I’m taking notes on
- react
- react hooks
- preact-cli
- preact
- storybookjs
- react patterns
- typescript
- react naming conventions
which has led to a folder structure of
I’m just looking at examples of how others have structured their notes
@kkyang Being a developer myself, I feel its better to not just spend time organising notes in folders, instead what I have found useful to do is whenever I learn a new library or some ideas I try to relate them to what existing knowledge I have in other notes.
Say for instance I see typescript, instead of going ahead and creating a new typescript note, I would try first try to find how typescript fits into my existing knowledge, perhaps I have a note on static languages, then I can link typescript there and similarly to other concepts I already know like transpiled JS languages.
Focus on building connections instead of neat little folder structures
Avoid the tendency to organise notes prematurely, just pen down knowledge and revisit to find patterns that can be linked.
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I usually take requirements and come up with conceptual solutions, and later on also actualizing the features. I am not sure this applies to other professional engineers, maybe leaning a bit more to product development.
When I think about conceptual solutions (ideas, designs, flows, target users, what they would do without our feature, is this necessary, is it an innovation, etc), I usually do brainstorming sessions.
Pure reasoning notes
The first one is where I try to systematically reason about the problems and solutions.
So it’s mostly just pure reasoning, without much references from other sources.
Framework-based notes
On other attempts, I take a more holistic approach, searching for some frameworks or ideas from books, articles and try to reason from there.
I use Obsidian to take notes on these references, making sure I only write things that I can understand. Here’s a note on a recent book called shipping greatness, particularly a chapter about UX:
And here’s a note of the second brainstorming session:
As I said, It’s not strictly engineering-oriented I suppose, but hopefully it helps !
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do you use the zettelkasten method?
I’m still learning about how to apply it.
From what I’ve read so far, should my zettelkasten simply be one list of notes that utilize tags/links? (no folders)
is that how your obsidian is structured?
I’m also learning zettlekasten still, right now I’m using all three ways i.e links, tags and folders since I find depending on the content they are all very much useful.
Example:
I use tags for organising short snippets, quotes and example code. Of course I do sometimes reference these in other longer notes using links.
For long form topics and research, I start off with an index that is like a table of contents linking to specialised notes in each section. This helps in forming a central point around which other ideas and notes can be linked.
Finally I use folders to isolate (not organise) stuff like work, daily notes and poetry.
Note, in all these cases the focus is on understanding, learning and documenting stuff for knowledge if the intention / goal is to use notes for managing actual work then a different approach may be required
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