Knowl­edge Base

Zettelka­sten

The German word zettelka­sten refers to a prac­tice of note taking with phys­ical "slip cards" or note­cards (sim­ilar to his­toric li­brary in­dexing sys­tems, or a con­tacts Rolodex). The core value in using the note­card form factor is the flex­i­bility to re­arrange cards, en­abling cat­e­go­riza­tion and or­ga­ni­za­tion through dif­ferent meta­data.

Using one's zettelka­sten could re­veal new mean­ings or con­nec­tions be­tween ideas. This con­cept was es­pe­cially pop­ular in the 1980s, and around this time Ap­ple's Hy­per­Card soft­ware was re­leased— es­sen­tially a dig­ital "zettelka­sten" and a par­allel in some ways to early Hyper Text Markup Lan­guage (HTML).

Es­pe­cially in the realm of soft­ware en­gi­neering, I've no­ticed more and more ac­counts of people em­ploying unique note-taking methods, or even building custom soft­ware for the pur­pose of a per­sonal knowl­edge base/​zettelka­sten/​wiki.

Soft­ware en­gi­neering is a unique field be­cause tools like ver­sion con­trol allow pro­gram­mers to ac­cu­mu­late and doc­u­ment knowl­edge with great care and pre­ci­sion. Soft­ware is also mainly built through text which al­lows a per­sonal KB to con­tain real ex­am­ples of code or con­fig­u­ra­tions that could easily be copy/​pasted or ref­er­enced. With this in mind, I de­cided to build my own knowl­edge base.

Readme

This is a be­spoke per­sonal wiki to hoard book­marks, tu­to­rials, blogs, and other In­ternet cu­riosi­ties. The in­tro­duc­tion con­tains fur­ther meta in­for­ma­tion on this KB— how I or­ga­nize pages, link topics, which tech­nolo­gies are used, etc. If this is your first time, give it a read.

Oth­er­wise, please click through the index below and sift through my dig­ital trea­sure troves. You can also find KB pages through the site's search.