Schemas for notes is a great idea
(In other words, representing information using a relational database is a generally good idea).
Having templated notes for different concepts sounds like such a great idea. This is exactly what capacities.io and dendron.so are trying to do. I think you can also do this with Notion, but it’s not as scaffolded making it a little more difficult to do it. Having schemas/templates lets you have a single source of truth for your notes, which is exactly what Airtable is trying to do.
#update 12-27-22: This is what Capacities.io 202212271351 attempts to do
Created from: Note-Taking Software I’m Currently Using 202204102217
uid: 202207051412 tags: #notetaking #insights
Think Of How You’Ll Win. Think Of How You’Ll Not Lose.
My two-step strategy for passing the interview: 1. Win. 2. Don’t lose. It sounds obvious, but the split was very helpful. I’d imagine “Where can I blow them away? Where can I really win?” For me, that was coding in Python. So I wanted to make sure to create and exploit situations to show that off. I wanted them to have some really positive things to say in the debrief. Then the other side was “How would I blow it?” There are some mistakes that can really outweigh the positives and sink you. I knew for Netflix that was not knowing the culture. Some others for me were sucking at SQL and not having good answers for some work history questions. So, I strengthened in these areas and didn’t lose. These things aren’t going to be yours, but just some examples to find your own.
This is a really god paradigm to think about when planning out projects.
Created from: Useful habits for a software engineer 202205212326
uid: 202205212334 tags: #insights #advice #career
Nothing good comes easy
The thing I appreciate the most about Berkeley (and I’ve seen this in people that I’ve interviewed from Berkeley as well) is how Berkeley makes sure you don’t just learn about things at a surface level. You’re forced to learn them inside and out, think about the concept in every which way, and if you don’t do that you’re just not going to do very well on tests. You can float along without trying much, and this holds for extracurriculars as well, but if you want to be truly excellent, you need to consistently take the next step for it. That’s something that Berkeley has taught me. Nothing good comes easy.
Created from: Journal entry: 05-15-22 202205150801
uid: 202205180042 tags: #self-reflection #insights
How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily
Source: How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily
How to write more clearly.
Why? Because clear writing leads to clear thinking 202204102301
The unselfish perspective
Good writing is partly a matter of character. Instead of doing what’s easy for you, do what’s easy for your reader. Package the information so that it enters your readers’ heads as easily as possible.
Five steps of the writing process
- Planning
- drafting
- Revising (getting it on paper better)
- Editing (fixing spelling, grammar, typing)
- Formatting
avoid meaningless variation
never draw the reader’s attention to anything that’s not the main point.
Planning
Why am I writing this? Who is the audience?
How to think more clearly
- Language
- Logic
- Epistemology
How to learn complex material more easily
- Have goals and adjust them often.
- Use a suitable learning strategy.
- Insist on clear understanding.
- Organize the knowledge for yourself.
uid: 202204240146 tags: #writing #literature #howto
Airtable diary: 04-12-22
Things I did:
- Publish small changes to [main resilience] Add newShardAssignmentsAccessor by MananKhattar-at · Pull Request #13934 · Hyperbase/hyperbase and
- [main resilience] Remove mainConection from ShardAssignmentsMysqlReadOp by MananKhattar-at · Pull Request #16867 · Hyperbase/hyperbase
- About 4 hours of meetings, including going through a PR with Keunwoo
Things to talk to Keunwoo about:
-
Talk to Keunwoo about Redis / expanding cache patterns
- Also want to mention this: Consistent Cache Protocol - Google Docs
- Takeaway — interesting stuff, but not relevant to worry about right now.
- Design abstraction for rolling out the new shard assignments accessor
- Based on his PR, do we want to have options for enabling multiple strategies?
- Takeaway: See this doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/13WI6hrRbz_sMqoBU09tKTpNBj0v1ESgJ9tYVZgITO6Y/edit#heading=h.p9oetauq6vz1 for context about this.
uid: 202204120953 tags: #airtable #journal
It’s more important for notes to be complete than fully digested
I was cleaning up some old notes (specifically this one 202006022328), and noticed that I had left a bunch of notes as TODOs (that I never went back and filled in, because I left them as open loops https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Close_open_loops). I also had one note that I hadn’t left as a TODO, and instead had pasted a simple link to a source 202006031238. This worked just as well as me adding a whole write-up about it, because this wasn’t the type of thing that I wanted to process very deeply. (As compared to things that you might want to write more deeply about: Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply). This relates to mistakes I made with my old Zettelkasten 202204102322 — I didn’t realize earlier that Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply | The best way to read is highly contextual, and instead I was trying to just
Created from: Note-Taking (index) 202204102124
uid: 202204102227 tags: #notetaking #zettelkasten #incomplete