Weekly Journal 54 - VS Code, Dendron, Bullet Journal, Taiga

tl;dr

Did an about face on my PKB tooling and went back to VS Code and Dendron. Trying to augment my paper journal with some digital tools.

Bullet Journal & Taiga

I have written about my love of the Bullet Journal method and the use of a physical paper notebook. However, there are some use cases that are harder to support with just paper. In particular searching through older notes becomes more of a problem as it’s likely they are in a older journal. I also find it harder to look at the bigger picture with my paper journal.

I have been experimenting with a few different digital tools that can fill in those gaps and I have settled on Taiga as my tool for high-level project management. My personal knowledge base will be my source of notes and documents that I will use for research and looking up past things I have learned. I really like kanban boards and the principles of lean manufacturing for managing projects. Taiga is an electronic kanban that is fully open source. It is offered as a hosted service, or you can install it locally on your own hardware. I’m currently using the free tier of their hosted service, but if end up keeping it I plan on setting up my own local installation.

I use Taiga to represent and track my projects and the major milestones, and then I track the smaller tasks in my paper journal. So far this working pretty well and I expect to continue down this path.

VS Code & Dendron

I’ve been seriously waffling and procrastinating getting my personal knowledge base (PKB) going due to some concerns I had over becoming too dependent on a specific set of tools. After some experimenting with Neovim, I’ve decided to stick with VS Code as my editor of choice for the time being. For better or worse, it’s just too good of a tool to not use it. While I do still have reservations around Microsoft’s stewardship of the project, for now it’s “good enough” and I’m going to keep on using it.

I am still hopeful that one day Neovim will become a true alternate, but at this point I would be losing too much functionality if I made that switch. I will continue using Neovim from time to time and exploring plugins and configuration options as new versions become available.

Along with VSCode, I am embracing Dendron to manage my PKB. Again, I’m slightly concerned about getting too attached to a specific tool, but at the end of the day the entire PKB consists of Markdown text files. If something happens to Dendron I can always look for another tool that can work with plain text. I think I finally got tired of wasting time dithering over what tools I was going to use instead of getting started doing useful work.

What’s Next?

Working through some of my backlog to get notes imported into Dendron.