Welcome! 🌿

This is my digital garden where I store my notes on various topics and continuously add to them, treating each note like it’s a plant that must be nurtured. This website was created based on Maxime Vaillancourt’s garden available on GitHub here. I mark notes pages as Seedlings 🌱, Budding 🌿, or Evergreens 🌳 based on the how much development they have undergone and how much I still want to add to them.

I decided to move all the different notes sections like random notes search and book notes sections from my personal website to this website, because I was never really using the notes on my personal website. I would “finish” writing up the notes for a topic and then I would move on to a new topic and never refer back to old notes. This was a big problem because the whole point of having notes on my website was so that I could refer back to them. The thing is,conventional note taking systems are NOT conducive for accumulating knowledge, because it is difficult to make connections across notes, they mostly structure notes in a hierarchy, and they do not promote repeated and interleaved learning. A note taking system should be designed to work for our mind, we should NOT need to have our mind work around a note taking system. For example, I don’t think that my brain has separate clusters where it stores information from books I’ve read and then information from classes I’ve taken. This website is meant to work FOR my brain by taking advantage of Evergreen notes and bidirectional notes links. I remember when reading the book Range, highlights from Range Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World David Epstein argued that the most effective way to learn new things and develop skills was by repeated instances of training that are spaced out over time (interleaved training). Evergreen notes promote this method of learning because they encourage visiting old notes and adding to them over time, so that you can grow a new notes sapling into a full Evergreen tree. Bidirectional notes links allow you to easily refer to other notes pages you have written and keep track of which pages and thoughts link to one another. These notes are organized non-hierarchically, and this website stores a graph of all the links between different notes pages that you can see at the bottom of each notes page. I hope that storing notes in this way will encourage me make connections between all the different things that I learn.

I will be writing up the notes for this page in markdown on my computer with Obsidian, and then I will incrementally push the updated notes to this website.

Here are all the notes in this garden, along with their links, visualized as a graph.