Note taking in 2021 - blog.dornea.nu

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2021-06-15 10:00:10

Almost 6 years ago I was blogging about organizing and visualizing knowledge. At that time I was just playing around with Tiddlywiki and using it to collect notes during my CCNA course. I couldn’t anticipate to which extent personal knowledge management systems would become famous and trendy. And people nowadays don’t blog anymore: They take care of their digital gardens. While most of them seem to be just a collection of random notes, there are actually good ones where you can actually read through the thoughts/notes and learn something new. Here are my favourite ones:

And what about me? Yes, I still blog but I also have a digital garden available at brainfck.org. For me blogging and maintaining a public source of inspirations and ideas is not the same. A blog post should be readable and contain full sentences. A collection of ideas/thoughts can be just some bullet points with some random links (for me they’re not random, since I actively set those links in order to inter-connect notes). The idea is that I use my PKMS to lookup things and generate new content (like this post). That’s for the introduction. Now let’s talk about the importance of having and maintaining a source of notes/thoughts.

After all: What’s all the fuzz about “note taking”? You have them somewhere, you use them somehow. Well, there it’s more than that. In my job as a Security Engineer I need to keep up with new technologies and arising attack vectors. Additionally I tend to read about non-IT topics I’m currently interested in. Each time I want to make sure I don’t have to re-read/review that source again when I think I might use an interesting idea/concept out of it. Making future-proof notes (a terminology used in a Zettelkasten system) is essential for me also because I use that content to generate new one.