Taking notes for work with Obsidian

Taking notes isn’t just a way to remember facts—it’s a career tool for building an evolving, interconnected knowledge system. The core claim is that traditional school-style notes fail because they’re siloed by topic, frozen after the semester, and written for a short-term goal (passing an exam). That approach leaves people with lots of effort and little long-term usefulness. A better system treats notes like living software: continuously updated, linked to related ideas, and refined as understanding grows.

The proposed “new way” starts with four principles. First, notes should be interconnected, mirroring how the brain organizes knowledge through relationships—similar concepts, contrasts, and even opposing ideas. Second, notes should constantly evolve rather than act like a snapshot; as careers progress, the notes should be revised to reflect new context and corrections. Third, notes should operate at multiple levels of abstraction: keep them grounded in immediate context, but also distill patterns and models that can transfer to new situations. Fourth, the system should be future-proof—digital enough to search, back up, and share, but not so dependent on a fleeting format that the notes become unusable later.

To make that workflow concrete, the talk borrows a software engineering loop: continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). In that model, work cycles through planning, building, testing, deploying, collecting feedback, and incorporating it into the next iteration. Applied to note-taking, “continuous note taking” means capturing what’s learned from reading, conversations, or experiments; processing it into notes with both context and abstraction; publishing or sharing it; and then using feedback—what was misunderstood or what held up—to guide the next round of learning and writing.

Obsidian is presented as the practical environment for this approach. It’s positioned as a “second brain” and a personal knowledge base: local-first, not SaaS, with notes stored as plain Markdown files in a vault folder. That design choice matters because it preserves ownership and makes the notes portable—any text editor can open them, and the vault can be backed up elsewhere. Links are central: typing bracketed text creates explicit links, while Obsidian also surfaces “implicit” links by recognizing note names across the vault. Graph view then visualizes how ideas connect, turning a collection of notes into a navigable network.

The talk then shows how this supports real work. Notes can function as test logs (tracking runs, metrics, and links to tools like k6 and Grafana dashboards), as learning distillations (turning messy exploration into step-by-step instructions), and as curated reference shorthands (topic notes that complement—rather than replace—official documentation). Obsidian also supports publishing and collaboration: presentations can be authored in Markdown via plugins, and documentation can be edited directly inside GitHub repositories because the vault is just files. Finally, publishing notes—such as through Obsidian Publish—creates “learning exhaust,” a lightweight record of what’s been worked on and refined.

The closing argument ties the system to employability. For a remote, internet-based career, notes become proof of capability: each note is an idea connected to others, tested against competing concepts, and written in the author’s own words for a future reader. The result is faster learning, cumulative knowledge over thousands of notes, and a portfolio-like graph of what someone can do—something that can help land roles even when skills aren’t immediately visible on paper.