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Ask HN: How do you manage your personal and professional knowledge base?

by QuasiAlon on 2/23/18, 8:56 PM with 11 comments

Explained by example: whenever I learn something new, say, a new machine learning model and its implementation in Python, I create or update a Jupyter Notebook, write my notes as text, add the relevant snippets and run them on locally stored dummy data. This proved useful for me with Python.

I need an effective system for other things, like SQL, or generally anything I learn or need to keep track of for future reference. I tried google docs, sheets, even slides, txt files (with my always open sublime text), etc. etc. I find my stuff is scattered all over the place and isn't very productive or efficient.

Any insights?

  • by xstartup on 2/24/18, 1:36 PM

    In my company, we've 10 different teams. We are doing cutting-edge work in our niche. We use git repos, we extensively discuss things on Slack then summarize stuff in large paragraphs in Discourse. Then we commit the code to GitHub, our discourse bot adds links to the relevant discourse discussion in git commits.

    Our teams have some guys who are difficult to work with but they've lots of talent. So, we've given them space and time. Sometimes, they do not like to take part in the discussion but it's important that they explain their thought process in Discourse.

    This process reduced the time it takes to the onboard new member.

    Most of the new members are already familiar with Slack, Discourse and GitHub UI. Search is just good enough, bot makes it easy.

    For prioritization, we maintain slim Trello board. We don't use it much.

  • by petercooper on 2/23/18, 11:15 PM

    It's a shame this didn't take off as it's a constant problem for me. I feel like I could do a lot more if I had a proper system for this. It all ends up as random tweets, notes in Evernote, podcasts, emails, etc. and I have no real approach to doing it other than trying to keep it in my brain (which fails).

  • by Bucephalus355 on 2/24/18, 1:15 AM

    Giant OneNote notebook with a numbering system up to 10,000. Split into categories of 1,000 each. Open up new sections each time you start a new topic. 5,000 might be programming, 6,000 history, etc.

  • by suj1th on 2/24/18, 9:11 AM

    I have recently started organising little snippets of learning I gather during work using dnote (https://dnote.io/). For instance, I have organised multiple 'books' around topics such as regex, Apache Spark configurations and others. The best part is that it works right off the terminal. But as a downside, it is not the best way to take extensive notes; only 1-2 liners.

  • by ckluis on 2/26/18, 2:50 PM

    100% this continues to be a problem. I want something like gingkoapp, but with the WordPress's new Gutenberg editor with the ability to add items on a "page" or down a node.

    gingkoapp.com

    But, for now I use workflowy.com for almost everything (the failure is pictures & multi-media).

  • by farseer on 2/25/18, 11:49 AM

    This is a problem for my organization as well. We have considered Confluence but haven't tried anything yet.

  • by ram_rar on 2/26/18, 6:20 AM

    google docs and confluence.