[Journal] Zettelkasten for Programmers

ctietze

Starting a project log of sorts.

I've held a couple of impromptu and planned workshops over the past 2 years in programming meetups and the like to show the Zettelkasten Method to people who are professionally trained in, and accustomed to, splitting up concepts into small (atomic), reusable pieces; where reusability isn't about the litmus test "is this actually used in multiple places?", but itself is the heuristic for another principle: Composability. Does this function/type/... compose with others? Will you be able to use this in a new context in the future? Will this be flexible, or is it a one-off, dead-end piece of code?

They tend to pick up the mechanics really quickly, I found. It almost feels like the whole thing is trivial. And I agree -- the mechanics are simple, and it's trivial to start a ZK if you're trained in the mechanics for a decade or more, and just never used it for non-code writing before.

On our recent trip to Italy for a friend's wedding, I took the time to review my material on the topic.

For a more structured workshop, I'm still happy with this tripartite approach. Not tested in full, but this is the current draft's 50000 ft view:

1. Mechanics. See and learn the moves. Practice with stuff from the fields of programming any programmer can understand.
2. Structure. How to create structure from your notes, in your ZK; why structure is useful for programming in particular, and what it looks like in practice.
3. Process. Riffing on the thought that in the communication system that emerges with your use of the ZK, there's only distinct time that passes as you use it, so how to you design and create useful change? How do you deal with decay ("legacy code" or "technical debt" like notes); and how do you extract value from the system, how does it influence your work and day?

Note: I have a 'troll' note in my ZK for many years now that I use as a Feynman's Darling: "Structure and Process of structure and process", { Structure, Process } × { Structure, Process }, sort of an epistemology exercise, where you get "structure of structure", and "structure of process", and "process of structure" and "process of process" that slowly evolves into more than a weird thought experiment, with useful applications. Go figure!