# [[Taking notes for work with Obsidian]] ## The video Related:: "[[Advanced Slides]], [[obsidian-playbook/Obsidian Plugins/Core Plugins/Obsidian Publish|Obsidian Publish]], [[Obsidian Dataview|Dataview]], [[Graph view]]" Related:: "[[sources/Presentation/Mine/The Lost Art of Taking Good Notes|The Lost Art of Taking Good Notes]]" <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0g38K_DtxFI" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ## Timestamps [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=0s) Intro [00:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=38s) Keeping up with tech trends [04:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=266s) New way of taking notes: continuous note-taking [08:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=523s) What is Obsidian? [10:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=650s) Getting started with Obsidian (demo) [16:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=973s) Logging - a devlog/test log [19:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=1188s) Learning in Public [23:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=1393s) Advantages of continuous note-taking [26:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g38K_DtxFI&t=1584s) My personal Obsidian graph ## Transcript Hi everyone. I'm Nicole van der Hoeven, and I'm a senior developer advocate at Grafana Labs. Now that title is funny because actually I've never been a developer. And I also have 12 years of experience in performance testing. But when I got my first testing job, or actually my first tech job, I had no experience in tech and also no formal education in computer science as an economics major. So I'm telling you this to explain to you that I seem to have a history of getting jobs that I wasn't qualified for at the time. And in this talk, I'm going to try to show you how I did that. See, the problem with any new industry, but especially in tech, is that when you're getting into it there's just so much to learn. Tech in particular just moves so quickly that it's impossible to really fully catch up in every aspect of it. So as a new person, you might look at these two different microservices-based architectures from Amazon and Netflix and not even know where to begin. Honestly, even for those of us who have been around in the industry for a while, this is still pretty daunting because there's just a lot of potential starting points and it can be really difficult when something is disjointed like this to understand the system as a wider picture. So this is a problem that's going to be in tech for our entire careers, but it turns out that there's already a solution to it. And it's a solution that we somehow knew about when we were in school but somehow forgot about. And that's just taking notes. The problem with our notes from school or the way that we take notes in school is that they never really evolved beyond just writing things down in the first place. That's probably what most of you think of when you think of taking notes. However, that's just one step of the process. In order to build a robust note-taking system you really have to go beyond just writing notes down or writing down what the teacher said. This is the old way of taking notes. These are my personal notes from my university calculus subject, and they might look a bit funny now, but at the time I actually thought that we were pretty good. Like all my classmates wanted to photocopy my notes because they were pretty good for that time. However, here are the problems that I noticed with it. First, my notes were separated by topic. This was only for my calculus notes. I had a different notebook or at least a different section in a notebook for every subject that I had that year. And there was never any mixing or matching or linking between those subjects even if they could have been a little bit more similar. So for example, I had literature and I also had composition, two things that were English related, but I still kept them in separate notebooks. Same thing with calculus and algebra. They were also static. These notes, and probably that's because they were analog, never changed. I never went back and added things or adjusted things. As I learned more they were kind of just like a one and done thing. I wrote them and then I just go forward onto the notebook. They were also contextual. Now that's not necessarily a bad thing but the fact that they were only contextual and that particular context was honestly not to learn. The context was I wanted to pass the exam at the end of the semester. And all of my notes and what I chose to even write down in the first place were based around that goal that I wanted to be able to get a passing grade. That meant that they're also temporary. I wrote them and never went back. So after the end of the semester after I did eventually pass the exam, I never added to those notes and kind of really forgot about them. Even when I took like future more advanced levels of calculus, I never went back to the basics. It was kind of like something that I wrote once and then never looked at again. So how could we improve from the old way? Because clearly that didn't work, because I never went back to my calculus notes and they were never useful for me, despite the fact that I spent so much time on them. Ideally, I would find a way to make those relevant now. So here is the new way of taking notes. Now, the new way is much more akin to how our brains actually process information. For starters, everything is interconnected. Just like in our brains we don't have kind of single ideas that are just floating around that aren't linked to anything else. Notes should also be connected to each other. They should have linkages to say what ideas are similar and even what ideas are dissimilar or are opposing in some way. The new way of taking notes should be constantly evolving. In fact, we should never think of notes as a snapshot in time. They should be an entire evolution, a life cycle that moves with you. As our knowledge changes and we learn new things in our respective careers, we should also be updating our notes to reflect that evolution. New notes are also both abstracted and contextual. So contextual meaning they are relevant to you in a particular point in time. But also as you take more notes, ideally you would start to see the patterns and models. And once you have those abstracted ideas, then you're kind of creating different levels of abstraction, and having that means that you can apply greater, grander concepts to other situations. And lastly, new notes are future proof. Now, part of this does have something to do with the shift from analog to digital. Digital notes are more searchable, they're more long lasting that you can back them up, and they're easier to share. But they should also not be so advanced not so cutting edge that we're going to, as an industry, move on from whatever medium and format you chose in a few years. So you have to strike the right balance there. Now, if this is sounding a little bit familiar, well, actually taking notes is a lot like building or testing software. when you think about it. Luckily that's something that we happen to know a thing or two about. So this is something that you may or may not have seen. This is the CICD kind of infinity loop. CICD stands for continuous integration, continuous delivery. Sometimes it's called continuous improvement. Now the idea is that when you start with a new project cycle, you plan what you're going to release, then you build it, and then you test it. You deploy it into production, you listen for feedback, and then incorporate that feedback into your planning for future features. Now, this model holds up pretty well. It kind of strikes the right balance between speed and responsiveness to what people actually want. Now, what if we could actually apply this to note taking as well? Well then we'd have something like continuous note taking. Now what would that look like? It would look like notes where we read something or talk to a colleague or learn about something, process what we've learned, and have different levels of abstraction, perhaps, so that it's rooted in context and also abstracted. Then we write about it, we share it with other colleagues, and put it out into the world. We listen for that feedback of what we misunderstood or what we got right, and then we incorporate that back into the cycle and let it inform what we're going to learn or write about next. This idea of continuous note taking is the new way. It is a very different way from the note taking that you knew of, that we knew of when we were all taking notes in high school or grade school. So that's where we get into Obsidian. I'm not at all affiliated with Obsidian. I'm just a rabid fan of it. Obsidian is a second brain, but it is, I like to think of it as a note taking app, but less like Google Docs and more like your own personal Wikipedia. The problem with Google Docs is you write a doc and then you send it to people, but then they have to keep track of those links. So like then you just have to go into Google Docs if you're looking for something and then search for it and it's all disjointed and there's no like central repository where other people can see everything you've ever shared with them. And it's just a little bit difficult. Wikipedia on the other hand, is nice and organized and yet you can still follow the threads of different links to get to what you want and the search is also way better. So Obsidian is an extensible knowledge base app. It is a free one so you can download it. It is not open source, although it is really easy to inspect because it is based on Electron. It is not SaaS. It is not a SaaS platform. In fact, it's local only. You can do whatever you want with your notes and you have complete ownership of your notes. And all of those notes are saved in marked on files. So just plain text files and you could do them as you wish. So you could still back them up to some other cloud syncing service. Now, one of the cool things about Obsidian is that it is also highly customizable and highly extensible. In addition to some core plugins that come with Obsidian that you can enable and disable, there's also a very rich third party development ecosystem for these plugins. And some of those plugins are ones that I would never use Obsidian without. So let's get into a demo of what Obsidian looks like and how to get started. Obsidian is available on a variety of platforms, mobile and desktop. So I'm using it on Mac Os now. And I'm gonna show you how to create a new vault. So I'm gonna create a vault here, and I'm gonna call it Eurostar. And then I'm going to look for a location. I'm just going to click that one and click Create. And this is going to open up a window of Obsidian. This is what it looks like. There's a side panel here. There's what's called an editor here and there's also another side panel on the right here. Now, when you create a vault in Obsidian, a vault is just a folder on your file system. So if you go into Finder where I put that, now there is a folder called Eurostar and there is something that's untitled there because I haven't done anything with it. So I do have a folder here, but let us create a new note in that folder and let's call it Testing. So let's type something here. "Software testing is awesome." Now, when you go back into Finder on your file system, you'll see that there's a markdown file called Testing. So I'm showing you this to explain that while there's stuff that's happening in Obsidian, it's actually just using your local file system under the hood. So there's nothing magical about it, which means that you can just open this vault in any text editor. So again, it is future proof. You don't need Obsidian to continue to have access to your notes. You can then rename this and say Awesome notes. And then you can also do things like open today's daily note here on the icon here. If I click that, that's going to create a new note that is timestamped to today. And what I like to do in how I would suggest that you use Obsidian is start with a daily note. Just create a new daily note every day and then just freehand it so you can write down what happened during that day or meetings that you have during that day. I'm going to add something like, "Today I presented at Eurostar 2023." And as you might notice, I'm using brackets. I'm putting two brackets around Eurostar 2023 and that's making it a link. So I'm going to click on that link and now it's created a new note called Eurostar 2023. So, "At Eurostar I talked about software testing." Or let's say "testing" 'cause we already have a note on that. Now if we go here on the right, I've opened up the side panel here to show you that there is a linked mention section where it says "Today, I presented at Eurostar 2023." Wait, that's not what this note is. So it's actually showing us other notes that are linking to this note. So it's saying that, "Hey, on this daily note you actually link to Eurostar 2023." Now the problem is that now you might think that you have to create a link every time that you create a note or if you think that you're going to create a note in the future, maybe you should link it the first time that you type it, but that's actually not true. So we are looking at a link here from the daily note. So let's go back into that. Now I'm gonna show you what it looks like, if I remove the link. So I just typed it as normal. Now, if we go to Eurostar 2023, I can go and see that there are no more linked mentions because I've removed the link. However, there's still an unlinked mention. That's because Obsidian does this awesome thing where it doesn't expect you to create explicit links. It recognizes the implicit links. So, it's enough that you have a note called Eurostar 2023, and it'll show you all of the instances in your entire vault where you've said "Eurostar 2023." Alright, so I'll, I'm gonna go back and link it because there is still a cool thing that happens when you do make explicit links and it's called graph view. All of these things come in Obsidian by default, by the way. So when I open the graph view, now it has this cool little graphical representation of the notes that you've created. So you can hover over them and look at them individually. So if I hover over the daily note, the Testing note is kind of faded into the background and that's because I'm looking at one particular link right now. And then I can also click on any of them to go to that note in particular. So that's a little overview of how Obsidian works. Hopefully, you see that it is very different from Google Docs, and links are an essential part of using Obsidian. So let's get back to the presentation and let's talk about different ways that you can use Obsidian. One of the ways is logging. So now I've shown you how to start with Obsidian, right? But rather than build it up for you, which would take a really long time, I'm actually going to show you what I already have. So we're going into my own personal vault. So this is an example of a note that I have that I created while I was testing something. I was actually trying to learn something. So you can think of this as a dev or a test log. So, I'm talking about the different tests that I created. Everything in Obsidian is Markdown. So this is a Markdown table, and then it is rendering everything by default so that when I move my cursor out of it, it's rendering the table already. So you can see that I've written down the different runs that I had, and for each one I was running load tests, and I was kind of tracking the number of views a description and a bunch of metrics. And there's even a link to k6 and the Grafana dashboards for those tests. And this is how I like to use Obsidian a lot when I'm trying to figure something out. You know, it doesn't have to be anything polished. These are my notes. So this is just a record of how I use Obsidian, of how I'm learning. And this is a code block, which is delineated by these back ticks. And I can copy and paste that elsewhere. I put links in there. And then in this one I was trying to figure out how to install Grafana on Kubernetes. So this is a record of everything that I tried. And I timestamped some things to using the markdown syntax for headings. So this is how I use Obsidian for logging. Another use case for it is learning. So after all of this, I did eventually learn how I should install Grafana on Kubernetes. And then I started to create kind of like a parent note and this is what that looks like and this is where I distilled my learnings from this log. And this one is much more polished. I'm saying, "No, these are the exact steps." You know, I left out all the times where I kind of meandered, and then I went through. And now if I ever have to do this again, I can refer to my own notes about it. I don't have to go to stack overflow, which is excellent. This is just going a bit more quickly here. This is one where I am looking at the k6 tool. I work on the k6 team at Grafana. So I have a lot of notes about k6, and each one of these has like maybe in some cases some content that I've created on it. And they aren't supposed to be a replacement for the k6x documentation. This is more like a shorthand, a curated selection of topics that I refer to again and again. And this is all related to me, all related to my knowledge. So it is different from just a documentation that somebody else created that you might not have gotten a chance to look into. Every part, every note in this is something that I created. And I've done the same for things like, you know how to learn git, which is something that every developer or tester is going to come across. And I do it with programming languages as well. So here's how to do stuff in Python. Again, this is still based on what I need to know about Python. I'm probably not going to be creating a Python based app and deploying it from scratch but I do need to know how to do some things to do my job. So that's how I use it for learning. I also use Obsidian for learning in public. Now, it's kind of similar to the previous one but I've already shown that I create content based on the notes, that I have in Obsidian. And being able to start from something from the notes that I already have rather than like starting from nothing is a very, very big part about why Obsidian is so useful for me. I also use it to create presentations like this one. I'm gonna go through all of these in in a second, but I also use it to collaborate on GitHub with my team. I publish almost all of my notes, so that I can share them with other people, and that includes a change log of what I'm working on. So let's get into these. So I, on top of doing videos for Grafana Labs and k6, and doing presentations and writing blog posts, I also have a separate YouTube channel personally where I have 30,000 subscribers and I talk about taking notes actually. And so I use Obsidian directly to both create a content calendar and generate content based on the notes that I already have. In terms of presentations like this one, oh, this is not wrapping quite well but, actually, I can show you that this presentation that I'm giving you is written in Obsidian as well. So there is a plugin for Obsidian that lets me just create presentations in markdown, just like notes. So presentation is just a note formatted differently. So these are all of the slides, which is independently publishable. And when I change one thing here, I change the presentation as well. And then in GitHub, because Obsidian is just a folder with markdown files, and on my team on k6, we hold our documentation in a GitHub repository, that means that I can just use Obsidian to actually open the GitHub repo as a folder, which means that I can write and contribute to documentation within Obsidian with all of the supercharged linking capabilities without other people even knowing necessarily that I use Obsidian. So it's really useful for that. I'm kind of using it like an IDE. I also publish all of my notes online. Well, not all of my notes, most of my notes online. And this is using a service, a paid service, called Obsidian Publish. But I think there are lots of different ways to do this. You could use a site generator like Hugo to do the same thing with markdown files, but this is another way that I'm putting things out there and seeing what other people are going to say. So all of the things that I was showing you with Git and Python and k6, they're all available on my public notes. That includes a change log. So I also keep track of new things that I've written about. And so you can look at my change log as kind of a sneak peek into what I'm thinking about, what I've changed. This is the idea that our notes should be constantly evolving, and you can see the change logs, the last 500 notes that I've worked on. So here are some of the advantages of continuous note taking. First, you learn faster. I think that I sometimes get into this frame of mind where I love to take notes. So I just take notes for the sake of taking notes. But actually taking notes also helps you learn. It's a lot. It's kind of like that thing where you always learn, a test of learning is when you can explain and express something to somebody else. Taking notes is kind of like that, except the person that you're explaining to is the future you, the future you that probably doesn't remember anything that that you're working on now. Another thing is that iterative and incremental work accrue over time. So you might think that if you zoom in on the individual note basis, you might think that you're not getting anywhere, but several thousand notes later, and I think I'm up to 10,000 now in my main vault, then you start to see patterns, and you start to see a body of knowledge rather than just an individual instance or idea. You also never start from nothing. The fact that I have so many notes at my disposal means that at any point I can go into my Obsidian notes and look for let's say performance testing, and I can open that up and I can see things that I've written on the subject. And all of these links are links to notes that exist in my vault. So if I wanted to write something about performance testing, there's a lot to pick from. So I'm never just looking at a blank screen. I'm looking at what do I have already in my notes that I can kind of massage and tweak or rearrange. And the other thing is that by learning in public, you create learning exhaust. Learning exhaust are the byproducts of learning and especially learning in public. So they are things like being able to publish your notes. Learning exhaust is super useful because it quantifies what you've been working on, and not in a way where you feel like you have to write a blog post and it has to be super polished and edited. Learning exhaust is just putting things out there and not worrying if you've gotten a few things wrong. Just to wrap up, I said in the beginning that I have a habit of getting hired for things that I'm not qualified in. Now you may be thinking by now that that isn't exactly true, and you're right. I was qualified for those jobs, just not in a way that was immediately demonstrable until I started taking notes. See, I learned most of the things that I know online, either on my own or through interactions with other people. Grafana Labs is a completely remote company. So all of my interactions are on the internet. That's really great for personal learning and development but it is also really difficult when you work like that to communicate what you're capable of to a future or potential employer. Taking notes is my way around that. This is actually the graph view for my personal Obsidian vault. So every dot, every node in this graph is a note that exists in my vault. It's an idea and one that I've fleshed out in my own words based on my own learnings and my own experience, written for the future me that might no longer remember what I was working on. Every line here between the nodes is a link where every idea in my vault has been tested against different ideas to see like, is it related to this? Is this an example of another idea? Is this an application of it? Is this a concept that another idea is at odds with? And having this kind of second brain, because it really looks like a brain right now, is what has enabled me to nail down and give to my employers an idea of what I'm capable of. So taking notes is really something that's going to help you in your entire career. First, it helps you learn in the first place. It helps you create a record of where you've been and what you've done and what you've been thinking about. And it helps other employers, future potential employers, understand what you're actually capable of. If I could start my career over, I would take notes like this, in the continuous note taking sense, a lot earlier. And maybe I would've gotten to where I am faster. So thank you all for listening. I have a few links down here. If you go to my site, nicolevanderhoeven.com, and look at the first, at the latest blog post, I also have a link to these slides there, so you don't have to take notes, or at least you can take notes in your own time as you go through it. I'm also happy to take any questions about Obsidian or note taking or any sort of knowledge management topic for tech. Thanks for watching and for listening.