This website is sort of an experiment. It is implemented as a blog because blog software provide some useful features, but it has slightly different goals.

You could say it is dissimilar to, yet not entirely unlike¹ a blog.

This post describes that dissimilarity.

I am not excited about using Gen AI for software development. Not against it per se, just not terribly interested in it.

But work has been pushing us to use GenAI lately, so I've been (somewhat reluctantly) trying to incorporate it into my workflow.

A few months ago, I signed up for a ChatGPT account, used it for a few research questions, and then mostly ignored it.

This week, we all got Copilot licenses. This post is about my initial impressions of Copilot, and a couple of small wins using it in VSCode, while working on react-i18n translation files.

Obsidian makes some assumptions about the shape of your notes. One of those assumptions is that the names of your notes (i.e. the basename of the file without the .md extension) is unique across your vault, regardless of which folder it's in. In fact, many people recommend using Obsidian without folders at all. There is also a unique note core plugin that creates notes with a time stamp prefix.

I would say this is a "soft" assumption, meaning that you don't have to follow it, but Obsidian will be easier to use if you do.

I have been using a version of the PARA method for a few years now. It is what has worked better for my brain than other methods. This post is aimed generally at anyone interested in note taking methods, and specifically at a co-worker who asked about the note taking method I use like a month ago. (Sorry for the delay, $COWORKER. Hopefully this is still useful.) There are plenty of articles and videos that go over the method, so I could just share one of those. Unfortunately, many of them cover only the main folders, and skip the information that explains how it actually works in practice. I will try to fill in some of those gaps.

This post is for software developers who don't currently think much about their notes. You may take notes, but don't think of it as a "note taking system", and have probably never heard the term "Personal Knowledge Management".

I have 3 goals with this post

1. Convince you that you should start a note taking system
2. Explain why I recommend Obsidian specifically for that purpose
3. Provide some tips to help you get started creating your system in Obsidian

I manage my notes with Obsidian and store them in git. I have some notes that I share between home and work, and others that I only access via personal devices. I used to manage these shared notes with submodules, but recently switched so sub trees. However, I ran into some issues that have me considering switching back to submodules.

I keep my notes in markdown format, with tags stored in frontmatter. Sometimes I need to apply a particular tag to all notes in a folder. This post describes how to do that using yq.

YQ supports operating and transforming YAML front matter via the --front-matter flag.

For example, when using a file that has front matter, yq can extract the YAML correctly:

$ yq --front-matter=extract '.' ./with-frontmatter.md.txt
---
key: value

However, it behaves unexpectedly when the file does not have any front matter.

Fallout is one of my favorite game series. The hacking minigame isn't bad, but there is a lot of it, so it can get tedious. The purpose of this tool is to simplify solving the minigame.

The "perfect" version of this tool would be the following:

• When I come across a locked terminal in game, I snap a photo of the screen with my phone
• That photo is automatically converted to a game board in the tool
• When I make a guess in the game, I enter the "Likeness" reported by the game, into the tool
• The tool would then analyze what we know so far, and automatically eliminate certain candidates

The main thing I care about right now is the logic to iteratively eliminate candidates.

I have been meaning to create a blog for a while, but I keep procrastinating--usually by overthinking which technology to use.