What’s a note?

This is a notebook. Before anything else goes into it, here is what a note actually is.

What

A note is small. An architectural pattern, a lesson taught by life on a random day, a mistake we believed was the correct way: each gets its own simple, concise note instead of a chapter in one long page about everything. It can be long, when the topic genuinely needs it, never long just for the sake of being long.

Why

Notes are short, quick to read, easy to digest, and focused. They’re the dots you collect while learning. You connect them later, in real life, when you actually need to.

How

A note starts with an unfamiliar buzzword, something new learned that day, something that clicked through experience, or a theoretical concept engineers are supposed to know that I keep forgetting. If it feels worth revisiting until it’s properly baked in, I keep it in mind, sketch it on a whiteboard or paper, talk it through with an LLM, read or watch something about it, and once it’s understood, write the distilled version down, along with whatever other dots I found on the way.

Reading one

Any note can be read on its own, to understand what it’s about. Inside a trail, you can also see how that dot connects elsewhere.