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I want to dedicate the first blog post to answering the headline question. It will remind me to keep blogging when I will have thoughts to stop.
My personal Google, Jun 2019
I do it to organize all my notes I take each and every day. Before I started the blog, the process was both analogous and digital.
When I collect an intriguing fact or a quote, I usually write it down on a yellow A7 card. Each card has a unique number, and there is a bunch of rules to assign a number to a given card. To have a quick search over hundreds of cards, I made an inverted index and stored it on small white A6 cards. Cards with notes and cards with index and number assignment rules on top of that form my analogous system. The old good pen-and-paper process. I call it "my personal Google."
I borrowed the idea of the system from the Sönke Ahrens' talk "How to take smart notes." The talk is very inspirational and resonates with my thoughts about learning and creativity processes. I encourage you to watch it. It inspired me to try out the Zettelkasten method to keep my findings and ideas in a somehow organized manner.
Despite many advantages, the method is painfully slow for me. I found myself creating notes without numbers because I had no time to properly "index" them and make links with existing cards.
The other way I collect interesting stuff is digital. I send myself emails with links, PDFs, images, and screenshots. Now I have totally disconnect "systems" for the same purpose: organize my thoughts and information I found interesting. The blog is my N+1 attempt to fix that.
I asked my friends what they would like to learn from me. Surprisingly, they all have different opinions on that. I compiled the list from the most remarkable answers:
- The books, videos, and courses I found useful
- What my professional path was like
- What technologies I find promising
- Tough situations and how I deal with them
- Why I don't quit my career as Software Engineer
- How I perceive the world and why is that
- Which trends I see in our society and what I think about it
- The roots of my beliefs
- My interpretation of technology news
- Deep understanding I gain from technologies I deal with
- Explanations of some complex IT concepts for non-techies
- Answers on "stupid" questions (side note: they never stupid, they always interesting and push me to learn something new)
- About computers and the Internet
- What I learned today
I think it is a pretty good list for a start. Readers of this blog might expect that I won't drift too much from the topics in the list. I hope this blog post is the most lengthy one, and all upcoming posts will be way shorter.
Jun 22, 2019. Berlin
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