Methods and systems for grasping, understanding, and making sense of any general knowledge or information.
Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#2If you're someone who thinks & processes information mainly in the form of Stories & Metaphors, then organization (and recall) becomes organic/natural.
Also on a side note, we must all be wary of epistemophilia!
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#3mind maps, memory palace, vision boards, note taking systems where a single item can be embedded in multiple places within a hierarchy.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#4I try to do mind maps sometimes, but on day to day basis when reading articles to save for later, Google keep with relevant tags.
But before that, always define whether the information you capture is useful or volatile. If useful, is it today, next week or someday? Someday is probably never ;-)
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#5I use the GTD method (or a variation of it).
Information capture happens in a variety of media and goes into a physical or digital "inbox". I have both kinds because sometimes I take a note with pen and paper, or I have business card, or I have my cellphone and I can take a picture.
My inbox includes the "pictures" and "downloads" folders on all of my devices. I link my devices together using SyncThing.
Then I have an org-mode file I keep my projects, someday-maybe's, and project archives in. My reference "file" is a 1/2Tb drive split into folders. My file organization is pretty flat right now, so at the top level I have "school" and "recipes" and "day trips", etc.
This is an utter cludge, but it does most of what I need it to. I've actually adapted it some to use at work and that has allowed my to stay very organized with work projects.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#6I blog about it.
Writing helps structure and encode information in my mind
If I forget it, it’s on google, and I often land back at my old posts that I reread.
It might also help other people, but really future me (and possibly close colleagues) are the primary audience.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#7Try Anki, a spaced repetition flashcard software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anki_(software)
It is intended for memorizing things, but the fact that it forces you to divide knowledge into pieces small enough to fit on a flash card also helps to organize it.
And you can have different card stacks in Anki, so there also is categorization of knowledge.
Cf. the "Zettelkasten", a physical flashcard system which is actually intended at organization, not memorization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
Anki can be used to emulate that digitally.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#8org-roam + anki
ripgrep for search
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#9I crack open a book about the topic (usually from manning publishing). Self-document my learnings in the form of tree-structured bullet-point notes. Usually in a git book space.
I can always revisit the notes to quickly refresh myself on the topic (if a context-switch happens later down the line, or if the topic is not related to my day2day work).
I've successfully used this approach to onboard myself for a Spring project (known to have a steep learning curve). It was my second time using Spring, with an 8 month time separation. The ramp-up/refresh took about a week.
There were also some positive unintentional side-effects of my approach. I keep my gitbook notes public. I found that making my notes public ended up helping others on other teams in my company. Specifically, more experienced Spring devs who were new to Webflux were able to use my notes to jump right into a client's code base.
Re: Ask HN: How do you organize your knowledge?
#10I've used personal wikis and knowledge bases for myself and they work okay. vimwiki has been useful for me.
I find that I do some pretty cool stuff and then totally forget how I did it a year or 5 years later, mostly with coding. The open source projects I documented and explained are things I myself google to help me set them up in the future, so a way of codifying my knowledge has been to try to write about it and put that in public.
I set up development environments for myself a lot, so I wrote an article about how I do it https://modfoss.com/creating-my-development-environment.html and then put the code on GitHub as well https://github.com/symkat/modfoss_devel So if I don't do it for a while, I'll have a starting point and me-from-the-past explaining what I did and why.