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How to build a second brain as a software developer

aseemthakar.com

171–177 of 177 posts

Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer

#171
post #14

Not sure about second brain but I’ve come to the conclusion that a life long git repo is probably a good idea. eg keeping track of vaccines, medical history etc.

I started writing a daily journal with obsidian, which has a lot of this information. It’s all in a private repo on GitHub and is mirror on my home NAS. I actually keep two daily journal one for personal and one for work.

I keep is simple, three main section’s. A morning section where I write what I need to do that day, what happened already, what’s going on in my brain.

A evening section listing what I got done that day, and what’s going on in my brain.

The third section is technically the “first”. Which is a reflection on yesterday after a full night sleep. What I did wrong, what I need to improve on, etc.

A small section in which I include excerpts from my task lists for personal or work. A small section with generic daily goals like “For god sakes comment your code”.

Another small section I call “daily avoidance“ which is stuff I want to avoid, like “Working through lunch” basically bad habits, etc.

The reflection part I use as an outlet to write about what worked/didn’t work in achieving those goals, avoiding the bad habits or any other thoughts I had about yesterday or yesterdays work.

I keep both as strictly separate, I don’t write about work in the personal one unless it’s because I had a issue that caused a strong reaction. I.e Argument with co-worker. The work one doesn’t have personal stuff in it and is mostly talking about the projects or idea’s I had.

Most of them are less the 100 (average is less then 75) lines, with about 2 dozen or so markdown formatting.

Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer

#172
post #11

I've tried to incorporate some of the ideas of the "second brain" and it didn't really give me that much. My lessons: 1. It's always super helpful to write things down. Taking notes from what I read/learn is a great way to verify that I understand it. It sharpens my thinking. 2. However, maintaining the "second brain" is a lot work. It's not only about "linking" together notes. You also need to maintain some consiste…

I am not going anywhere without my reMarkable 2. This is just crazy convenient tool for dumping thoughts and trying ideas. E.g. when I design something. I'd draw abstract boxes and other shapes, then add a new layer, make connections, another layer some notes. You can freely move things around or erase with a pen. I think my productivity gone up like 10x. I especially like the fact that I can just leave my laptop, si…

Do you use the handwriting to text service?

Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer

#173
post #11

I've tried to incorporate some of the ideas of the "second brain" and it didn't really give me that much. My lessons: 1. It's always super helpful to write things down. Taking notes from what I read/learn is a great way to verify that I understand it. It sharpens my thinking. 2. However, maintaining the "second brain" is a lot work. It's not only about "linking" together notes. You also need to maintain some consiste…

I'm in the same place. I optimized the note taking experience and now I have loads of notes/links/snippets in Org files but the organizing part (move, link, update) is still painful.

I would love to have a pseudo-smart tool that suggests meaningful actions based on the note content. Like "Move note to project 'learning-kubernetes'", "Tag with 'home-improvement'" or "See similar notes: [...]". That and the ability to do it on my phone would be a killer feature for me.

Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This approach kind of exploded on me, and I couldn’t find any window anymore. Recently discovers tab groups, and that you can name browser windows. With those two in place I actually see some hope of recovering control.

I would say the too many windows issue is a feature, not a bug. If you have too many windows thats too many things to do, either you need to do one or prune your list

Indeed, to many windows. Partly due to not finding things though, ctrl+n being simpler than look for the old context. Named windows made them simpler to find, thus simpler to avoid ctrl+n.

The other issue, of course, is my TODO-stack growing faster than I have time to organise and plan it. I’m hoping a working Zettlekasten can address that part by moving the entire class of research and design type of tasks out of the “should be doing right now” category.

Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer

#175

You guys should try Fibery.io

Never heard of it before. I love this: https://fibery.io/anxiety

Even on a joke site I can't stand fade-in on scroll.

If you're using scroll events for anything other than loading and unloading content outside the current viewport you're doing it wrong. Please stop.

Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer

#176

the author does not get deep into when/what to put into the 'second brain'. Just like one does not go to the market unless it is not in the pantry, one should not replicate what google can get for you in a second. So, then, what needs to be in the second brain is more of keywords and categories, so that we can make the google searches more effective for the particular question we have P.S.: assuming we will always ha…

I started down this path years ago because bookmarks and sites I know used to exist started vanishing faster than I could catch up with my to-read folder.

Link rot is real and sites/information I used to be able to find on google in seconds have been gone for years.

Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer

#177

Since 2003 I have printed every single interesting web site I've ever bothered to read - and some I haven't - to PDF file. Instead of Ctrl-D to bookmark, I Ctrl-P to print-to-pdf. I keep these PDF files and use them where most people would have bookmarks. The advantage is that I have an offline cache of materials (60,000+ files), a carefully curated list of stuff I like (or can be bothered to think about long enough…

I can't believe I never thought of this. I keep a huge bookmark folder with "things I might need 10 years from now", but finding things becomes a torture if you can only search by the title and not the contents. And after a few years it's likely that the page will be gone. But why save pdfs instead of downloading the webpages?

PDF is safe. Webpages are dreadful. I only need the information, I don't need the scripts.
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