Show HN: Dendron – fast open-source note-taking in VSCode

A lot of my note-taking therefore becomes an excuse to successfully ignore the things I know I don't need to pay attention to.

I do have a bunch of notes that I use for everyday stuff, however. My engineering journal is a hierarchical notebook, allowing me to go back and see all of the contributions I've made to $PROJECT, which is great come review time.

I also have a tech notes section for problems that I seem to have to solve over and over again. For example, every time we have a power outage, my Mac Mini gets stuck in a reset password screen, and I need to reset the NVRAM to fix it. I don't remember the keycode to do that, so I have a note called "Fix mac mini password reset" that tells me that it's `Cmd-option-p-r`.

Lastly, anything that might be good in a self-hosted wiki goes in my notebook; basically, my own little set of `README.md`s.

We routinely conflate todos/plans ('need to do this') , observations and patterns ('this is what i see happening when...'), events ('this happened...') and learnings ('this is what i did wrong, right...') as "notes".

I started with dropping everything in notational velocity (till it broke on my Mac upgrade) and / or 'email thyself' and like you said, it builds and its there but of little or no use. Unless its in my brain, I can't make connections. Without connections I cannot recall when I need it. It really does not help. Its actually net negative with the effort that goes into putting it in there.

I now use Google docs. One doc for each topic I am currently working on (e.g interview preparation, home purchase research, kubernetes, etc..) This builds topic wise documents which are exponentially faster to navigate/guess without needing text search or any filing system. I can skim through 1-2 documents and it provides context, history, insights, quotes in 1 place that I try and read more often which tends to stick in my head. Also given that I am more a visual learner, the place where something particular was on a document also brings in what was written next to it simply because I've seen it so often.

To be honest, I don’t see much appeal in publishing your entire unfiltered notes to the web. Synthesize interesting portions of them occasionally into coherent blog posts that other people can consume without digging through a forest of links, backlinks, and footnotes.