Academical Nerd

Analogue Note Taking Digital Mess We all need to take notes. Short messages for git commits, ideas from podcasts, quotes from all over the Web. At some point, a question comes up: where do we store these notes? It gets even worse with regular diary entries and to-do lists. One possible solution is to use a premade program like Evernote or Notion. It will store and organize text files for you, but this also means you should trust developers and server owners, as well as the encryption protocol. For anyone who worked with programming, there is a temptation to throw notes into a git-managed folder full of plain text files. Yet managing files by yourself is also a problem: plain text markdown works wonders for a while until there are too many files to keep track of. A system of folders and subfolders will take you further, but at this point navigation and linking become troublesome. The synchronization is an issue as well, although there are good tools that solve it even on mobile and L...

A diary entry from 2021-02-28. A perfect crystal is an infinite periodic structure that consists of atoms. Or at least that's what the textbook I spent a morning with told me. Neither a charming shine of a sapphire nor a flawless rose-cut diamond, only infinities of geometrical structures and ways to describe their properties. Imageni a mab who has spent his life working in this field: can he tell more about a sapphire shining in his wife's anniversary ring or it's trigonal crystal system? I hope to always choose the former.  It was surprisingly warm outside: a delicate March was floating in the wind. The snow was melting, revealing wastages of pets and their owners alike. This year usual shoals of stubs swimming in puddles weere ajoined by face masks, largely dwelling near subway stations and in parks and alleys. We met near the subway exit, hugged - snowflakes on her hat stung me with remainders of winter cold - and went for a long walk, jumping over puddles and slush. Hu...

I try to adhere to what I call “the golden rule of planning”: spend around 1% of the time planning the thing and 99% of the time doing the thing. It takes me up to ten minutes to write a day plan, an hour or so to make a weekly layout and about the same to do a monthly review. Yearly review takes up to three days, maybe four if I’m unlucky. Since the beginning of 2021 I’ve been using bullet journal for planning. And it’s almost perfect, there is only one think I dislike: the community. Google it and you’ll see the pretty calligraphy on spreads with drawings and colored pens all around the place. This clearly takes more than ten minutes a day. The bullet journal is supposed to be a tool with two purposes: plan the day, week or month and get anything that comes up into the inbox, you own ideas as well as any deadlines/appointments. I tend to throw some notes about the day in there, too. It is not a sketchbook, cookbook or a colorbook that you see on the internet. The bullet journal, or a...

Recently I stumbled upon old Free Code Camp post. It stated that every developer should have a blog. I dismissed it as clickbait, but later decided to come back and read the article. It was persuasive, hence the first blogpost. Although the text itself wouldn't be sufficient, I recently noticed the same tendency. So for the last four weeks of lockdown there hasn't been a day without coding. Some days I wrote something in two or more languages, used MatLab, Dart, Python and JavaScript, some SQL to top it off. I was programming a lot, but the amount of writing stayed the same, averaging two journal entries per week. So my programming skills improved a lot due to intense practice. But my writing also improved, even though the amount stayed the same. I'm not talking about style or word choice. It's my ability to word insights and struggles that improved. For you it might not be new, but for me - and for some of the people reading this, if there are any - it is. Remembe...