Ask HN: How do you document your knowhow, past projects and lessons?

I use IntelliJ/WebStorm. I open a Google Drive folder which contains a markdown file for each day.

Using markdown, in a SublimeText project, with MarkdownExtended, Markdown Preview, project search (using ripgrep), imagePaste (to paste from clipboard to a file in a ./.images directory along with the image markdown syntax), and a folder hierarchy that organises notes into general topics and filenames with project/contents descriptors.

I also write all my lectures this way and output to slides using backslide (remark.js).

I have two text files always open, `_inbox.md` (all unorganized incoming notes) and `_work.md` (tasks list and dates).

I've tried a bunch of different things and this is the only thing I seem to stick to. I sync it to multiple machines with BoxSync and keep it all in a git repo (for when I care about tracking changes, usually my commits are weekly, with useless commit messages).

That project must be really old, because I remember being excited about it at the same time I was excited about Emacs.

I used google-drafts, wikis, all sorts of combos involving folders & files & hardcopies before discovering org-mode 4..5 years ago.

Since then I've been able to forge 20 years of references, scans, pdfs, application-code!, shell scripts, photos, glyphs, graphs, fonts into an exo-brain (a nice word from the cool kids) that not only includes journals, time & billing, ledgers, feeds, project and resource planning, play-books & checklists for my own debriefing

into something version controlled that boots from a chroot and can transfer to android devices. i can now find, use and profit from clusters of notes, generate html and latex, read, write and code, interface with and even capture just about anything that life has thrown at me since i started re-tooling myself.

I've got a reminder/drill mechanism which picks high-level topics things for me to review and i just go with that to remember and refine old stuff as i go. Its a seething mess of useful.

In essence .. i tag, sort, sift, condense and categorize like everyone else. In under a gig of ram, and, as it happens, at the speed of thought via a consistent user-interface.

And yeah, of course i use a browser. I can capture/convert html to plain text & drag images into files knowing that everything will always be hyperlinked by not-too-obnoxious uuids.

For some reason I had to hold my nose delving into emacs after ignoring it for 20 years. It seemed so weird. Now that I've gotten used to working with software that enables general purpose computing, I'm experiencing Ataraxia.

Anyhow, to the OP, check your net-present-value figures. Are you expecting to be a knowledge worker for a while? Have you ever chosen a slightly harder path to make things easier?

If so, just take this note as a hint for what's possible when you're seriously looking to answer your own question :)

I am interested in personal experiences/anecdata documenting what happens to these collections when the collector dies. So much effort invested!

I plan to make sure organizational time pays off in the short term, and need to work up a 'site map' for my various digital collections (in the off chance anyone cares after I'm gone). Sharing as much as possible starts to make sense in the long term, so classifying what "must be private" must be done as part of the process. (A tiny bit of this aspect is reflected in how useful my own StackOverflow contributions have been across jobs!)

In this light, tools encouraging sharing useful specific technical info semi-privately within a small group of very close professional friendships start to make a lot of sense.