Blog
From web clipping to second-brain systems, these articles turn internet chaos into something future-you can actually use.
1868 published articles
How to write effective meeting notes — a practical guide for teams who want their meeting notes to serve as actual references that drive accountability and inform absent colleagues, rather than transcripts no one reads or summaries too thin to use.
How to build a personal developer wiki — a practical guide for software engineers who want a searchable, maintained personal knowledge base that captures the system-specific context, mental models, and workflow knowledge that makes them effective — and keeps it accessible over years.
How to build a reading list for system design — a practical guide for engineers who want a structured, curated reading path for system design, from foundational concepts to advanced distributed systems, without spending weeks figuring out what to read and in what order.
How to build flashcards from your reading — a practical guide for students who want to convert reading notes into high-quality flashcards that actually produce long-term retention, rather than low-quality cards that take time to make and time to review without producing learning.
How to capture knowledge before a teammate leaves — a practical guide for engineering teams who want to prevent the knowledge loss that occurs when an engineer departs, using a structured knowledge transfer process that works even in a compressed timeline.
How to document an API for your team — a practical guide for engineers and tech leads who want to write API documentation that actually gets used: structured, accurate, kept current, and written at the level of detail that makes a new team member productive without a tour guide.
How to document onboarding for new developers — a practical guide for engineering teams who want new engineers to become productive in days rather than weeks, using documented onboarding that works without a dedicated guide and stays accurate after the hundredth hire.
How to keep a debugging journal — a practical guide for developers who want to stop re-discovering the same bugs, reduce debugging time by building a searchable record of past investigations, and turn frustrating debugging sessions into durable knowledge.
How to keep a learning log as an engineer — a practical guide for software engineers who want a structured system for capturing what they're learning week by week, so that growth is visible, patterns emerge, and the record is useful for performance reviews and career development.
How to manage code snippets — a practical guide for developers who have accumulated useful code across Gists, Notion pages, browser bookmarks, and editor scratch files, and want a system that makes any snippet findable in under 30 seconds without hunting through old projects.
How to organize PDFs for research — a practical guide for students and researchers who want a systematic, searchable, and durable PDF organization system that remains useful when a collection grows from 20 files to 400, and that makes it easy to find any source without remembering the filename.
How to organize technical documentation — a practical guide for engineering teams who want documentation that engineers actually read and maintain, organized so the right document is findable in under a minute without knowing where to look.
How to prepare a conference presentation from notes — a practical guide for students and early-career researchers who want to transform their research notes into a focused, compelling conference talk or poster, without losing the nuance of the underlying work or overloading their audience.
How to read faster without losing comprehension — a practical guide for students who have more assigned reading than they can finish, and want to increase their effective reading rate through legitimate strategies grounded in cognitive science, not speed-reading myths.
How to run a blameless postmortem — a practical guide for engineering teams who want to learn from incidents rather than repeat them, using a structured process that identifies systemic causes without assigning personal blame and produces action items that actually get closed.
How to save Stack Overflow answers you'll need again — a practical guide for developers who are tired of finding the same answer for the third time and want a system that turns their most-used Stack Overflow discoveries into a searchable, annotated personal reference.
How to write a dissertation literature chapter — a practical guide for PhD students and graduate researchers who want to write a literature chapter that makes a sustained argument about the field, rather than a survey that summarizes source after source without building toward a coherent claim.
How to write architecture decision records (ADRs) — a practical guide for engineers and tech leads who want to document the significant architectural decisions their team makes, so future contributors understand not just what the system does but why it was built that way.
How to write RFCs that get read — a practical guide for engineers who want their technical proposals to receive genuine engagement rather than being ignored or rubber-stamped, through a document structure that makes the trade-offs legible and the decision required.
How to write runbooks that people read — a practical guide for engineers and SREs who want operational runbooks that actually get used during incidents, not documentation that gets discovered after the incident is resolved and is outdated by the time it's needed.
How to avoid plagiarism with good note-taking — a practical guide for students who want a note-taking system that clearly distinguishes quotes from paraphrases from their own ideas, so attribution is automatic rather than a last-minute panic before submission.
How to build a study system that sticks — a practical guide for students and lifelong learners who want a consistent, low-friction approach to studying that they'll actually maintain across a semester, not abandon by week three because it became a burden rather than a tool.
How to build a thesis research workflow — a practical, step-by-step guide for students and graduate researchers who want a systematic approach to finding, capturing, organizing, and synthesizing sources so the writing phase starts with material, not chaos.
How to cite sources in APA, MLA, and Chicago — a practical guide for students who want to understand when each style is used, how in-text citations work in each, and how to format the most common source types correctly without formatting errors before submission.