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Last night I did have time to look at how subscriptions work on Gemini. It’s just Atom feeds, an XML document with a list of links/dates/descriptions. That makes it pretty easy to add support. I just have to decide if I want my regular note additions to pop up in the atom feed, or just these main page posts.
I also considered putting in a giant page of links to all content, since that would give me a starting point for reviewing my notes. But I could also create a CGI for returning random links… Now is a good time to explain how I planned on using the notes section of the capsule.
But before that, here’s a little background on the notes themselves.
I suppose it’s meant to be a productivity enhancer and learning tool? Productivity both professionally and personally. Professionally, it helps to clearly define goals, tasks, expectations, and facilitate learning. Though I suppose you can replace professionally in that sentence with personally and it’s just as valid.
Also, I like that the things I do professionally contribute to personal development so that they have an inherent value beyond that means-to-an-end of getting paid. The way I conduct myself professionally, while it may not seem very “professional” to the casual observer, should reinforce or contribute to my character in a positive way.
I’m a software engineer by day where I work on a bunch of different projects with a bunch of different people for a bunch of different customers. Different customers and different projects have different requirements for progress reporting and I like to be lazy. When I say “lazy,” I don’t mean general indolence or avoiding doing (or being reluctant to complete) even necessary tasks. I mean lazy in that I like work to get done with the least amount of extra work and for tasks that are completed to not need to be completed again.
To be lazy in software design and implementation, the longer you spend in design, the less time you spend in implementation and the less likely that implementation will need heavy revision or to be thrown out and started over. The qualifier here is that the design needs to be “good” and there needs to be a balance between completing that design to the point where you haven’t hit diminishing returns, but you have done enough design that you’ve uncovered and mitigated potential problems.
Jumping right in and implementing without doing any work seems lazy, but can result in more work in the long run. That software may need more tweaking and modifying than software that’s being implemented according to a design. This in no way conflicts with Agile development, quite the contrary, Agile development, focusing on a minimum viable product or prototype, is an excellent way to obviate the very problem of diminishing returns and encountering extra work. You create something with the least amount of work to create it, and if it’s not the right something, you haven’t wasted a lot of time, theoretically, anyway.
Notes are a good way to prevent forgetting details and to hold myself and others accountable for the necessary work to get done. In learning, notes are an excellent way to organize new information and to facilitate repetition without needing to re-experience original source material. You never know when the original source will suddenly become unavailable.
I need to take good notes, and this repository is one of the ways I attempt to be better at doing that. There are generally three classes of notes that I take, but they’re expressed five different ways:
1. atomic notes
2. lengthier, raw notes (capturing initial experiences)
3. messy prose (where I explore a topic as a sort of brainstorming)
4. summary notes (of the lengthier raw notes)
5. composite notes (drawing on the atomic notes)
The most useful notes for learning a new topic, atomic notes are like database entries of knowledge that are scattered around, but can be easily drawn upon to retrieve information about a topic. They may be just a command or just a definition, but typically they’re accompanied by contextualization that make it fit better in that collection of knowledge in my head, but not necessarily linked to the larger context or domain to which they belong. So the note contains an atom of knowledge and commonly a point for attaching that knowledge to something in my head.
These are recorded throughout the day. Only the ones I record outside of work can ever make it into here, so this repository is only a tiny piece of topics that I’m learning or experiences outside of work. Made even smaller because only some of them are being tagged to publish here.
Lengthier, raw notes are driven driven by external activities such as sitting in a meeting, watching a YouTube video, reading a book, etc. They’re an attempt to capture salient points without necessarily knowing what’s salient. They’re organized by external factors but record something so it can be broken down and digested without having to rely solely on memory of the experience at a later date.
Lengthier notes that can be the result of an internal activity where I draw upon what’s in my head to explore something already experienced in order to derive additional value with mental exploration that’s partially recorded. The prose may meander but may also result in the creation of more atomic notes.
These are typically made as the result of reviewing existing raw notes. For example, I have the tags meeting, raw, and summary. The experiential notes taken during a meeting are tagged as meeting and raw (though not exclusively) and vary greatly in the amount of useful content they may contain. But I don’t worry about summarizing the content as I’m writing it.
The raw notes may include people’s names, paraphrasing, possibly even time stamps (especially if I know someone is recording the meeting.)
After the meeting (though sometimes as the meeting is winding down) I create another note for the meeting, tagged with meeting and summary (again, not exclusively) where I re-order content from the raw notes and create summaries focusing on objectives, progress, additional actions, and risks or problems. These notes I use Pandoc to convert into the markup used by the issue tracking system and I post for others to be able to review, contribute, or point out errors.
The issue tracking content is also used to generate status reports which keep customers informed without requiring me to spend time writing any additional reports or documentation. The meeting notes and issue tracking content are sufficient on their own that I don’t need to waste any time reiterating anything and it keeps team mates and customers informed.
These can be used to draw a collection of notes together like the messier prose, but tend to be more in the form of a document, thesis, proposal, how-to, etc. They tend to be (or be close to) finished products and they draw on atomic notes for their content and may reference sources.
For work materials, these can be used to create proposals and presentations. For personal stuff they tend to be a sort of essay to myself that explain a topic as I understand it. Some of those may make their way into the Gemini capsule.
The point is, composite notes are built up of atomic notes but convey something greater than just the atomic notes of which they’re comprised.
I have a git repository (well, okay, several,) and a set of aliases that I run from the shell to help me create new notes or quickly get back into the last note I was editing. The project contains a directory for notes, resources, and a directory is created for generated content. I edit all my notes in Vim and notes are committed to git on save.
The notes have a YAML header for some special meta data. The only important one here is that tags entry. Tags are used for sorting/searching, but the Makefile also looks at the tags. Anything tagged #gemini and #publish gets converted to a gmi file when the capsule is created.
For my work notes, anything tagged as a #meeting and a #summary gets converted to textile so it can be sent into the issue tracking system so that it can be automatically included in the status reports.
I have started to add a #study tag as well. From this I plan to create Anki decks, but I haven’t yet gotten to this.
So I plan to make use of the Gemini capsule to host notes for me to review, and for the world to see, too, as long as it’s not something too weird to mark as publishable. I might create a capsule-based flash card system, too. I’ve fetched Gemserv so I can experiment with CGI-side stuff, so maybe that will be my practical-ish test case for seeing how CGI works.
updated: 2022-12-06 06:37:32
generated: 2024-02-03