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 candiates.

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