2025-11-24
Edit: Coming back to this post is interesting. I still really like taking (semi)structured notes, but I have bounced between Notion, Obsidian, OneNote, back to Notion, and now back to Obsidian. Part of my recent return to Obsidian was down to rediscovering Quartz and being able to publish both my personal website and my notes from one place. Related to this was the realisation that I can now use AI to help with a lot of the tedium of maintaining a vast set of notes across many topics, helping to identify and eliminate content duplication and generally create a more cohesive, more easily navigable notes space. I don’t want to stray too much into AI for content creation, but so far AI-as-a-librarian has been pretty damn helpful.
I really like taking (semi)structured notes. I find it useful as a mechanism to help me remember things I think worth remembering. I am the only person I know that takes notes the way I do, and I have found it immensely valuable as an aid both in my day-to-day work, and more broadly in my career growth. So I’m going to talk about it, and hopefully at least one person finds it useful…
I use Notion to take notes, I have been doing so for around 3 years now. You don’t have to use Notion, but I find the UI intuitive, and I like how easily it lets me structure my notes and create links between pages, as well as being able to search across every page in my entire space (although the search can be a little bit hit or miss, I’d rather have it than not).
One thing I really like to do is to keep track of ideas about software development and delivery practices that I subscribe to. This is a practice I whole heartedly recommend to anyone who will listen - and I don’t think it only applies to people in the software industry, although it is very good for that.
I have a page in the root of my Notion space imaginatively called “Software Development”. In it, I have broken the contents down into a number of categories.
Some of the sub categories in my Software Development spaceEach sub-category in the space houses things I’ve found over the last few years that I’ve found useful or interesting or both - things that I want to save for future reference.
Here you can see the “Terminal” sub page’s contents - and the “Bash” item links off to yet another sub page dedicated more specifically to working with bash scripting. Pages can be nested deeply enough that I’ve never not been able to create a sub page (I’m sure there is eventually a limit).
Page content is written with an enhanced version of Markdown, supporting code blocks with language-based syntax highlighting, letting me create notes that are a mix of resources I find on the internet as well as code snippets and things I write myself.
It might seem like this is a lot of work - and it is certainly a non-zero amount of effort to get something like this going and providing value to you. I believe that it is worth the effort - there are things that I’ve taken note of here that I’ve referred back to years later, things that would otherwise have been near impossible to find again.
I also think this can be valuable to more than just people early in their careers. I have been working as a software engineer for 8 years now, and a resource like this to me only becomes more valuable with time, and as I continue to add to it.
Privacy?
All pages created in Notion are kept private by default - viewable only by the creator, and anyone invited to view. Pages like my Software Development one can be made public very easily. I use Notion both for things that I want public, and things that I would prefer was not public. Someone more concerned about their privacy status may prefer not to have such things coexisting in the same space, but it doesn’t really bother me.
So there you go - that’s how I take notes. Notion is great - I am not sponsored, I just think its an awesome product and I’ve gotten a lot of value from it without paying a cent (so far). If you want to use some other product, go for it, the method is what I’m trying to share, moreso than the tool. Hopefully at least one person reading this is inspired to go and start taking their own structured notes.