Welcome to the public part of what I call my Exocortex. Here, you can see me think. At the end, it’s really just a bunch of structured markdown files that help me make sense of the world.
Thinking is a perpetually unfinished process and hence this space is and will remain indefinitely work in progress. Some notes might lack any sophistication. Most of them are incomplete. If that bothers you, or you want to start a conversation on some of the topics covered here, feel free to send me a note at exocortex@sehn.dev, so I know where you found me.
Getting started
There are various ways to dive into this. The easiest is to use search. Simply
press Ctrl+K and start exploring. Another thing: A link like
this is an external link (to the GitHub
repo of this project in this case). Links like this (e.g. docs) are internal
links to other parts in my Exocortex.
You could also dive in by navigating to one of the following index notes:
- Explore my notes on things made by other people. I call them reference notes or refs for short.
- Explore my notes on concepts. Here, you still find lots of stuff made and thought by other people, but there’s certainly more of my own synthesizing and structuring going on.
These two shall remain the only two loose categories for this space. The more they bleed into another, the better. Everything else is added and then put in relation to already existing things. No further categories necessary.
How does this thing even work?
Check out the docs.
And what’s it for?
Writing helps me think, and I want an excuse to keep doing it publicly. Check out this quote by the OG of Zettelkasten techniques, Niklas Luhman:
What are we to do with what we have written down? Certainly, at first, we will produce mostly garbage (emphasis mine). But we have been educated to expect something useful from our activities and soon lose confidence if nothing useful seems to result. We should, therefore, reflect on whether and how we arrange our notes so that they are available for later access.
This is my space for reflection. I don’t intend to publish private text such as journals (I’m not even sure sometimes whether I should read them again). No, this public space is reserved for things that I deem useful to others.
Inspiration
There is list of wonderful Zettelkasten projects over here on GitHub. Some of my favourites are:
- Jethro Kuan’s braindump at https://braindump.jethro.dev
- Gwern’s legendary https://gwern.net
- Andy Matuschak’s working notes over at https://notes.andymatuschak.org