Since about 2001 I used YYYY-MM.txt plain text files and have a shell script to help create notes in the most friendly way I could think of from the command line at https://github.com/nickjj/notes.
Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details from your brain into text. I still use it today. The repo hasn't been updated in 2 years because it's a ~20 line script with a simple API that hasn't failed yet.
But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes on 1 semi-broad subject it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kubernetes, Kustomize / Helm, EKS, various cloud hosting details (networking, etc.), Terraform and ton of super useful commands / context. Details you for sure want recorded for later.
For this type of info I've been building up a personal knowledge base with https://obsidian.md/. It's really nice and I highly recommend it. It's been working well for keeping things reasonably categorized without wasting a lot of time on the details around keeping links and tags up to date. It also has Vim mode that's good enough where day to day writing feels natural.
I love this! And have been doing something like this for years.
The zero-effort part is key in my IME: if it's not zero effort, it won't stick. And if it doesn't stick, you won't reap the nonlinear long term benefits. There's the obvious benefit of magically reaching into the past and remembering things. But the hidden power that surprised me was the day-to-day experience of clearing cognitive clutter by typing things out in a place that I trust won't get lost.
Shameless plug: two years ago I hacked together a little node script to give my pile of markdown files a more friendly UI than grep: it would pass them through pandoc and massage the DOM and slap a a bit of JS on it. I've been using it everyday since and it's become my favorite productivity hack. I'm currently in the process of rewriting that ole hack in Go to make it more stable and easy to distribute (and to learn Go!): https://github.com/amirkdv/codex
Hey Nick! Thanks for linking to this! Had seen this once and forgot to bookmark it! While reorganizing all my knowledge notes lately just kept racking the brain on who created it.
Hate to nitpick but #!/bin/bash is not actually zero-dependency, as bash is not installed on BSD by default, and if installed won't be located at /bin/bash.
You could probably just change to #!/bin/sh without issue.
Thanks for bringing this up. It does mostly work the same with shell but the -p flag of read isn't available with POSIX compliant shell. I ended up changing that slightly and pushed a patch to use sh now. Every other feature of the script worked the same with sh without modification.
As for using #!/bin/bash instead of #!/usr/bin/env bash, that was an oversight from 2 years ago. I addressed that too in the above patch by using #!/usr/bin/env sh.
Totally works fine for a knowledge log when you're streaming high level details from your brain into text. I still use it today. The repo hasn't been updated in 2 years because it's a ~20 line script with a simple API that hasn't failed yet.
But when you want to really go all-in with in-depth notes on 1 semi-broad subject it's tricky because in 1 month's time if you're hardcore deep in the woods of learning, applying and using something you're going to end up with hundreds of concepts from an assorted set of tools and it kind of stinks to have all of that info sitting in 1 file. Think about using something like Kubernetes. That's really Kubernetes, Kustomize / Helm, EKS, various cloud hosting details (networking, etc.), Terraform and ton of super useful commands / context. Details you for sure want recorded for later.
For this type of info I've been building up a personal knowledge base with https://obsidian.md/. It's really nice and I highly recommend it. It's been working well for keeping things reasonably categorized without wasting a lot of time on the details around keeping links and tags up to date. It also has Vim mode that's good enough where day to day writing feels natural.