Reading List (Organizing Knowledge)

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Introduction

Knowledge management is an important topic for a software engineer. I have always been interested in material on the topic. When I decided to write an extensive post on my system and workflows, I started to collect sources and similar articles. To avoid further blowing up the original post, I will cover these sources in this separate post.

There is a vast amount of resources covering specific tools and usage examples. However, I was a little surprised to see that there are relatively few resources elaborating on a complete software engineering knowledge management system. Still, I found a couple of very interesting sources.

All resources linked in this post are also listed in this public Notion database.

Hacker News Discussions

Type: Ask HN: posts on Hacker News
Author: Various authors
Date: Various dates
Links:

Hacker News gets quite a bit of hate for its discussions and comments. While it is true that people can be a little ignorant, I think it is one of the better places to have a civil discussion online. The linked posts give a nice overview of what software engineers are looking for in the field of note-taking and knowledge management.

GitLab Handbook

Type: Company Handbook
Author: GitLab
Date: Frequently updated
Link: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/

I guess everybody knows the GitLab Handbook by now. It is a public document documenting how GitLab is run as a company, and therefore can be seen as a knowledge base. GitLab has a lot of success with it and the concept now gets picked up by more and more companies. It is actually another use case for Notion: Blendle’s employee handbook is hosted as a public Notion document.

How I organize my knowledge as a Software Engineer

Type: Post on DEV Community
Author: Bruno Paz
Date: Jan 16, 2019
Link: https://dev.to/brpaz/how-do-i-organize-my-knowledge-as-a-software-engineer-4387

This post is similar to my own approach of documenting my knowledge management workflows An engineer describes his personal strategies for organizing software engineering knowledge. I think the post is excellent and it gave me some ideas.

How I’ve Been Using Notion Personally and Professionally

Type: Post on CSS-Tricks
Author: Chris Coyier
Date: Jan 16, 2019
Link: https://css-tricks.com/how-ive-been-using-notion-personally-and-professionally/

This is an extensive post from the co-found of CodePen about how he uses Notion for all kinds of things.

Content by the creator of Dnote

Type: blog posts and company website
Author: Sung Cho
Date: Feb 5, 2018 & Sep 9, 2018
Links:

Sung Cho is someone who has thought even more about personal knowledge management than me. In his articles, he describes the usual problems, such as organization overhead, and limited searchability. Because of these issues, he decided to build his own solution that takes a radical approach to the issue. As outlined in my own post, I think that a fundamental part of a knowledge base is to incorporate existing public web resources, which is something that Dnote does not seem to address. Still, I learned a lot from his reasoning and Dnote is an interesting tool, possibly in addition to some of the tools I have presented.

GeistMap: A personal knowledge base with a focus on connections

Type: Post on Hacker Noon and GitHub repository
Author: Bryan Haakman Date: Jan 16, 2019
Links:

Similar to the posts above, Chris Coyier has created his own knowledge base tool. His focus lies on visualizing connections between notes and information. The tool is open source and published on https://github.com/bryanph/GeistMap. His blog post defines excellent criteria that any such software should adhere to.

My Text Data: Public text file repository

Type: GitLab repository
Author: Miloslav Číž
Date: Frequent updates
Link: https://gitlab.com/drummyfish/my_text_data

This is a unique take on the personal knowledge base concept, a public GIT repository with text files about all kinds of topics. I do not think that it’s a good idea to share this kind of personal data publicly, but it is interesting to see someone doing it.

Keep Productive Blog

Type: Blog and Youtube Channel
Author: Mainly Francesco D’Alessio
Date: Frequent updates
Links:

Francesco D’Alessio is a professional content creator focusing on productivity software. He often interviews guests about their Notion usage, which is a nice way for me to encounter fresh ideas.

Conclusion

I hope you found something that is of interest to you. If you would like to point out other resources covering knowledge management, you are very welcome to share them in the comments below or privately via email.


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