What are you working on this week? (2020-06-22 to 2020-06-28)

henrikenggaard

I hope you all had a great week! Maybe you have something exciting planned for this week or perhaps just some reflection?

I'm going to try something rather intersting this week: experiment design using Zettelkasten. Zettelkasten as a writing support is... well... what many of us are here for. However, as an engineer and researcher in a technical field, I also need to conduct experiments/simulations. The idea is to design my simulation suite using notes from my Zettelkasten, this can hopefully help me answer questions about what parameter ranges, what kind of settings, etc. etc.

Please tell what you have in mind

avggeek

If one works on the same thing for several weeks, does it count as a WAYWOW or is it more of a What Are You Working On this Month?

So yeah, work continues on the Python scripts for exporting Zettelkasten. I am pretty happy with one major accomplishment on those scripts last week - the scripts now correctly recognize all forms of markdown code blocks and ignore any wikilinks within the code blocks. This was something @ctietze had asked for and initially it seemed like there was no easy way to do it, but I eventually succeeded!

The only false positive is wikilinks that are mentioned as a 3rd level or deeper bullet point in a Markdown list. Which I think is pretty good for a script that doesn't actually parse the Markdown itself and is just using regex'es!

Bonus side effect of the above tweak - the entire file gets parsed in one go instead of being processed line by line, which should make the script faster. Although the script was already pretty fast to begin with.

henrikenggaard

If one works on the same thing for several weeks, does it count as a WAYWOW or is it more of a What Are You Working On this Month?

Well, I've been working on almost the same thing for the past few months As we say in Danish ting tager tid.

But very neat with the script! Is the end goal for exporting and making public ZK?

Massimo_Curatella

I've started my first Zettelkasten using Obsidian. While I have NO problem in taking notes, I feel less inclined in rewriting them in my own words and... less and less in connecting. Now, I am a the same point as usual: lot's of disconnected pieces. I can't stand it!

avggeek

@henrikenggaard said:

But very neat with the script! Is the end goal for exporting and making public ZK?

Yes. There's already one version of the script now on GitHub which does standard [mark](down) style link conversion but the next set of scripts will rewrite the links so you can put them into a Hugo blog and optionally run it through pandoc to expand citations etc. before generating the Hugo-compatible files.

ctietze

Now that I hit "Post", I'm already done with the 2nd editing pass of the ZK intro article for the blog 🎉

In programming news, we're preparing an update to Timing with team sync. I am working on the localization. Since my macOS update to Catalina and more recent build tools (aka Xcode), I need to update a lot of project libraries again so that everything works as intended. That's quite a lot of busy work. But progress on 2 of The Archive's roadmap milestones is good, and I'm looking forward to see the feedback of y'all.

GeoEng51

This may be boring to those with loftier goals (and I say that without any sarcasm), but I'm simply trying to build up my Zettelkasten. It takes time to capture a life's worth of thinking and experiencing - I'll probably have the same entry for weeks, months and maybe years yet. I do have some longer-term goals, one of which is to one day write a personal history for my family and friends, that somehow captures what I have learned from the experiences of life.

matti

I had a nice albeit short vacation to kilpisjärvi and fell (HA!) in love with the landscape last week. I also found my sealegs as regards to what to do with my time while experiencing being in nature and "waiting" while my partner is doing biologist things and taking thousands of photos: Short, essayistic 1-3 minute observational audio commentaries. I learned a lot and making the audios short and trying to link them and tag them in a devonthink database and enhance them at times with a photo or a map really was fun. And is fun, as this project is still continue-ing.

I did not progress Soziale Systeme as predicted the week before as I was kinda burned out from the long drive. I spent the weekend playing video games, mostly cataclysm. But I produced a nice blog post about my thinking while on the fell (in German, sorry): Ganz Interessant ("Autosoziologie" ohne erkenntnistheoretischen Zweifel)

I'll try to revisit some more of my audio Zettels from the trip and continue to verzettel Soziale Systeme.

Work-wise I try to get back into the habit of programming. My work has been a lot of coordination and figuring out requirements that needed to be communicated between future users and a senior programmer on my team who mostly implements this particular project at the moment, with very little time on coding itself. This also means little amounts of learning and therefore little amounts of note taking in my work time. I hope this will change again, but such is the nature of work when working for a company: The security of a permanent job is great, but you might be asked to do work other than what you'd actually like to do at times.