Software Development and Technology in general are areas that evolve at a very fast pace and continuous learning is essential.
Some minutes navigating in the internet, in places like Twitter, Medium, RSS feeds, Hacker News and other specialized sites and communities, are enough to find lots of great pieces of information from articles, case studies, tutorials, code snippets, new applications and much more.
Saving and organizing all that information can be a daunting task. In this post I will present some tools tools that I use to do it.
One of the points I consider very important regarding knowledge management is to avoid lock-in in a particular platform. All the tools I use, allow to export your data in standard formats like Markdown and HTML.
Note that, My workflow is not perfect and I am constantly searching for new tools and ways to optimize it. Also everyone is different, so what works for me might not working well for you.
Knowledge base with NotionHQ
For me, the fundamental piece of Knowledge management is to have some kind of personal Knowledge base / wiki. A place where you can save links, bookmarks, notes etc in an organized manner.
I use NotionHQ for that matter. I use it to keep notes on various topics, having lists of resources like great libraries or tutorials grouped by programming language, bookmarking interesting blog posts and tutorials, and much more, not only related to software development but also my personal life.
What I really like about Notion, is how simple it is to create new content. You write it using Markdown and it is organized as tree.
Here is my top level pages of my "Development" workspace:
Notion has some nice other features like integrated spreadsheets / databases and Task boards.
You will need to subscribe to paid Personal Plan, if you want to use Notion seriously as the free plan is somewhat limited. I think its worth the price. Notion allows to export your entire workspace to Markdown files. The export has some important problems, like loosing the page hierarchy, but hope Notion Team can improve that.
As a free alternative I would probably use VuePress or GitBook to host my own.
Save interesting articles with Pocket
Pocket is one of my favorite applications ever! With Pocket you can create a reading list of articles from the Internet.
Every time I see an article that looks interesting, I save it to Pocket using its Chrome Extension. Later on, I will read it and If I found it useful enough, I will use the "Archive" function of Pocket to permanently save that article and clean up my Pocket inbox.
I try to keep the Reading list small enough and keep archiving information that I have dealt with. Pocket allows you to tag articles which will make it simpler to search articles for a particular topic later in time.
You can also save a copy of the article in Pocket servers in case of the original site disappears, but you will need Pocket Premium for that.
Pocket also have a "Discover" feature which suggests similar articles based on the articles you have saved. This is a great way to find new content to read.
Snippet Management with SnippetStore
From GitHub, to Stack Overflow answers, to blog posts, its common to find some nice code snippets that you want to save for later. It could be some nice algorithm implementation, an useful script or an example of how to do X in Y language.
I tried many apps from simple GitHub Gists to Boostnote until I discovered SnippetStore.
SnippetStore is an open source snippet management app. What distinguish SnippetStore from others is its simplicity. You can organize snippets by Language or Tags and you can have multi file snippets. Its not perfect but it gets the job done. Boostnote, for example has more features, but I prefer the simpler way of organizing content of SnippetStore.
For abbreviations and snippets that I use on a daily basis, I prefer to use my Editor / IDE snippets feature as it is more convenient to use. I use SnippetStore more like a reference of coding examples.
Cacher is also an interesting alternative, since it has integrations with many editors, have a cli tool and uses GitHub Gists as backend, but 6$/month for its pro plan, its too much IMO.
Managing cheat sheets with DevHints
Devhints is a collection of cheat sheets created by Rico Sta. Cruz. Its open source and powered by Jekyll, one of the most popular static site generator.
The cheat sheets are written in Markdown with some extra formatting goodies like support for columns.
I really like the looks of the interface and being Markdown makes in incredibly easy to add new content and keep it updated and in version control, unlike cheat sheets in PDF or Image format, that you can find on sites like Cheatography.
As it is open source I have created my own fork, removed some cheat sheets that I dont need and add some more.
I use cheat sheets as reference of how to use some library or programming language or to remember some commands. Its very handy to have a single page, with all the basic syntax of a specific programming language for example.
I am still experimenting with this but its working great so far.
Diigo
Diigo allows you to Annotate and Highlight parts of websites. I use it to annotate important information when studying new topics or to save particular paragraphs from articles, Stack Overflow answers or inspirational quotes from Twitter! ;)
And thats it. There might be some overlap in terms of functionality in some of the tools, but like I said in the beginning, this is an always evolving workflow, as I am always experimenting and searching for ways to improve and be more productive.
What about you? How to you organize your Knowledge?. Please feel free to comment below.
Thank you for reading.
Top comments (9)
Thank you Bruno for sharing these tips!
I'm on a very similar quest of creating my own knowledge base and I relate a lot with your post :)
In my experience, I have really trouble with the snippets and cheatsheets parts. I never remember about which ones I have or store, and when I was using more than two or three softwares to keep different parts of knowledge, I lost track of where I keep what, and eventually give up. Can you talk a bit more how does it look like when you use your Snippets or Cheatsheets? And how does it look like to use so many different softwares?
Hello. Thank you for your comment.
Yes, Snippets and Cheatsheets is the most difficult part also for me and I am still trying to figure out the perfect workflow.
Right now I am trying to think like this:
I am very bad at memorizing shortcuts so I try to give clear abbreviations and make use of the editor autocomplete function to help me found what I want.
A tip, create your own snippets with sane abbreviations and avoid using third party snippets. You can take inspiration of course but I cant stand with some 3 or 4 letters abbreviations that most snippet packages you can find for popular editors like VSCode or Sublime use.
I use most VSCode and PHPStorm / Intelij but mostly in different contexts, so right now I dont feel the need to have snippets in sync between the two, but would be nice to have some kind of tool to do that.
For a more kind of reference cheat sheets that behaves like a resume of some language documentation, DevHints is working great so far. I like that its just Markdown, which make it kinda portable to other systems.
Same tip as before. Build your own, based on your needs.
For code that I might want to reference later, like interesting scripts or algorithms implementation I found on the internet, then it goes to SnippetStore.
There are some overlap in this for sure.
For example, I constantly search on Google the syntax for "create table" in MySQL. should I make it a snippet in my IDE or adding to the "MySQL" reference in DevHints? In the IDE works great if I am creating a database migration for example, but what if I want to run the query directly in the database? God, organizing snippets is hard!
Its a matter of trying and thinking well about how you want your workflow to be. Maybe you need to build your own tools. Who knows.
About the use of different softwares, I think its ok, If you are clear about the use of each one. It should be a no brainer to know when to use each of them and where to search for a specific piece of information.
In my case, besides snippets that like I said, still have some doubts, its very clear. Found an interesting article, archive to Pocket. All kinds of personal notes, NotionHQ.
Of course, the less software you have to use the better. For example I was using Evernote together with Pocket, and I completely ditched it now as Pocket can do everything I want.
I hope I answered your questions.
Btw, if you want inspiration about building a personal knowledge base take a look at this. Its simply amazing and an inspiration to me!
Thank you for the detailed explanation :)
Yes, we are on the same page about snippets and cheatsheet, it's plain hard. I will try to give a second chance with DevHints though... And yes, that knowledge base is the master of them all.
Hello, very nice tip for code snippets organize, mine are all lost in many locations. Pocket is the best utility for organizing the reading list, I'm using it for many years. I'm using Evernote instead of Notion+Diigo, works really nice for me.
Today are you using the same tools?
I love diigo too!
Nice suggestions! Thank you
Have you ever tried TiddlyWiki?
Nice Share and Good Advice! *Cheers
Can you share your resources, I mean the development workspace.
great article! nice advice !