What is happening in your ZK journey this week? March 26, 2025
Swimming with Ideas
This is yet another opportunity to share what you are working on with your friends here on the forum. Add to this discussion by telling us about your zettelkasten journey. Share with us what you're learning. Sharing helps us clarify our goals and visualize our thinking. And sometimes, a conversation sparks a magical moment where we can dive into an idea worth exploring. I'd love to hear more from you. 🫵🏼
Do you want a live one-on-one video chat with me about our adventures in Zettelkasting? Ping me at @Will, and we can schedule a time.
Here is my report on why I'm here and my current ZK work themes and ideas:
- This period has been quiet regarding zettelkasting because of health issues and my "Sketching Sprint." I've been too absorbed in sketching and have not captured any notes on sketching itself.
- Kindness is an interlocutor, sauntering around my head. I write, I converse, and we question each other. What is kindness? Is it a value? A wellspring of new and fresh thinking. Nirvana for an amateur philosopher.
- Writing and thinking intertwine in ways that foster a flourishing life. Observing and refining thoughts with writing enhances clarity, sharpens thinking, and leads to more polished writing and thinking. This powerful feedback loop positions early adopters to excel.
- This is a new idea to me. Literary Maps - a network of books. I've read and zettelized enough books to do this. I'm stealing this idea from @Edmund and his super instructional graph at A Taxonomy of Notes — Zettelkasten Forum.
- I'm proposing a new type of note. A MOI - a messy outline of ideas. I'm thinking about how this process could lead to discovery. We'll see where this goes.
- I've developed a way to publish my notes on the web. It is still in it infancy but you can check out the results at Will Simpson's Notes
Books I'm reading or read this week:
- Orlin, Ben. Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language. First edition, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Hachette Book Group, 2024. Bookshare EPUB
- Russell-Smith, Jen. The Joy of Sketch: A Beginner’s Guide to Sketching the Everyday. David & Charles Publishers, 2020. Bookshare EPUB, Sketch Project
- Callard, Agnes. Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. 1st ed, W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2025. Everand Audio.
Zettelkasting Soundtrack:
Nils Frahm
Anna Meredith
Adele 21
★★★★★
The "My rolling fifteen-day zettel production" is produced by a script for attachment to my daily journaling template. I do my journaling in Bear to keep personal journaling separate from my knowledge work.
Let me know if you want to see, discuss, or critique these notes.
My fifteen-day zettel production

I hope my contribution is helpful and you have even better ideas.
Will Simpson
My peak cognition is behind me. One day soon, I will read my last book, write my last note, eat my last meal, and kiss my sweetie for the last time.
kestrelcreek.com
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
Here is an updated map: https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/22931/#Comment_22931
I want to learn more about. 🙂
Books I'm reading or read this week:
Edmund Gröpl
100% organic thinking. Less than 5% AI-generated ideas.
I am continuing to develop my network of thoughts about nutrition, veganism, health, ethics. The Zettelkasten in this development shows itself to be a very valid approach, since these domains tend to connect each other very well. Currently I am focused on developing arguments and counterarguments about the choice of the vegan lifestyle.
I've been finding what works for me. Less about specific software - as always - and more about a system or process. I've found that starting with no title and a 'messy' tag helps me to braindump, which I then refine into one or more notes which I then connect to each-other and to other notes I already have. They gain titles last - and when I add a title, I create a file just for that note, without the 'messy' tag.
I've noticed this with other areas - art, software development. You can read all the advice in the world, all the opinions and ideas. You can't even really understand it until you try it for yourself. All of the above seems obvious in retrospect, but until I found it for myself I was struggling. I'm already feeling more comfortable in my notes than I did my first time around.
I've been thinking about - and writing about - writing and thinking a lot. I also started up a blog, with a focus on the process of writing rather than aiming for a particular standard of topic or quality. I'm letting individual notes or groups of notes spark a blog post, and then posting it once it feels coherant. I hope that I can keep the writing process up.
Started a new job, in a fairly 'locked down' IT environment -- trying my best to 1) use OneNote for my work PKM (boo!), and 2) practice good habits of processing my meeting notes to make them more meaningful and discoverable to future-me (yay!).
For all your days, be prepared, and treat them ever alike. When you are the anvil, bear -- when you are the hammer, strike. -- Edwin Markham
Oof, another week has passed...?
I have made some, but not much, progress on the practice and course plan for "ZK for programmers", and fiddled with a book outline on a pattern language. Am mostly using the quiet half hour or hour when my daughter sleeps 'on me' in a baby carrier for this. Apparently not enough
Also been trying out some tools, namely
Been tinkering on a Mermaid diagram renderer. It's a command-line tool at the moment, but the command-line-iness is just a stepping stone to (1) make a simple GUI and (2) create the infrastructure to convert not only Mermaid diagrams, but also graphviz diagrams and LaTeX formulae into pictures. Will become the back-bone for auto-previewing diagrams in your notes without requiring any special app to generate a preview. (Apart from, well, the converter
)
Reading
Production in the Zettelkasten
First dozen+ notes are programming fundamentals to bring into context the new stuff I learn, and connect it with things I did in the past:
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@ctietze
Maybe it seems impolite to ask, but I am curious about the idea in "202503130800 Notes like stamp collection".
I like comparing the production of Zettel to, for example, the curiosity of an entomologist or botanist, where collecting serves scientific advancement and is simultaneously coupled with the passion for collecting and hunting (scientia amabilis). It's always fascinated me. I haven't yet thought of the idea of a stamp collection. Sounds interesting to me.
@ChrisJoh not impolite at all! This is meant to be shared anyway eventually.
Here's the work in progress:
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
@ctietze
Great, thank you very much!
The distinction between collecting and hoarding is spot on.
The Zettelkasten - if you do it sensibly and take your time - prevents mere accumulation through meaningful linking (Verzettelung).
And that, for me, is precisely the double source of pleasure here:
1) The pure joy of branching out ideas (the joy finding connection points) leading to
2) the nearly magical emergence of unimagined new fields of thought that are waiting to be explored. So, that's the source of the collector's happiness.
@ctietze I'm sorry for resurrecting an older update thread, but I wanted to ask a question. I notice that you include technical materials into your Zettelkasten, e.g., programming principles and whatnot.
Have there been any discussions on the pros and cons as to dumping those technical snippets into a Zettelkasten?
I have made quite a bit of notes about this kind of technical materials for my personal education, but I've been hesitant to put them into my Zettelkasten, thinking that to me they are not quite "good enough" to be part of neural network of connected ideas to provoke and help the emergence of new ideas.
Meaning, when I interact with my Zettelkasten, I want to do so as if its'a dialogue. Quite often, those technical notes are not thought-provoking and merely there for me as reminders or to perform spaced repetitions on.
Hence, what I have tended to do is to write those notes as if they are literature notes, separated from the permanent/main notes in my Zettelkasten. I worry that putting them into my Zettelkasten bloats but dilutes the effectiveness of it as my dialogue partner.
I am just wondering if there has been any serious discussion on the issue. I suppose this pertains to those who use Zettelkasten as a study partner mainly in STEM subjects. I can see Zettelkasten working very well in writing-oriented subjects like humanities, but it seems to me that STEM needs a slightly different approach.
What do you mean, dumping
They're little, self-contained, publish-able snippets of things I know. Reprinted below.
Yes, technical topics lend themselves to technical analysis (how-to's, simple procedural thinking), but you, as the wetware-wielding human, can
I must sound dumb for repeating this so much over the course of 10+ years, but I don't understand this distinction. I do understand that people categorize their notes, but if stuff's outside of the ZK, it might was well not exist.
If I may: Maybe this distinction is not serving you as well as planned?
I'm working on material for a practical, three-day workshop targeted at senior programmers who align themselves with the software craftsmanship idea. Maybe I can report some insights after that.
202503261032 Pass string to Swift Process as STDIN
#swift #process
To pass a
String
to a command-line application that you run as aProcess
from Swift, you need to create aPipe
that you write the string data to:Using this as STDIN is quite simple then by replacing
Process.standardInput
. The following program is equivalent toecho "hello!" | cat
in the shell:202503250843 Constness permutations of containers and elements
#cpp #immutability
The const-ness of templated types can be any of these:
T<U>
exrpesses that both the container and the contents may change;const T<U>
expresses the const-ness of theT
itself, but allows mutableU
inside;T<const U>
expresses the const-ness of theU
contents;const T<const U>
expresses const-ness of the containerT
and its contentsU
.For example, a
std::span
can be marked so that its elements are constant, making thespan
a readonly iterable view:(cf 20250325spanpp)Omitting this, you get read/write access to the contents, so you can change chars at indexes:[#20250325spanpp][]
References edited for the forum;
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
This is a fascinating thread but lots of great examples (thank you, @ctietze )
I'm on the road a lot these days, so not a lot of productive Zetteling. I am still working within the new system I've adopted a few months back and really happy with it, but I'm getting to the familiar bottleneck of a few hundred notes requiring additional organization. No big deal, I have to do some linking now, some structure notes, but I need a few hours I don't have.
Still very enthusiastic about the whole thing.
"A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it." - Ernest Hemingway
PKM: Obsidian + DEVONthink, tasks: OmniFocus, production: Scrivener / Ableton Live.
I'm continuing to develop ideas and knowledge about running. Seeing videos, talking with experienced people, developing questions.
Zettelkasten is fantastic, it allows me to start a brand new knowledge field at any point from the bottom, one thought at a time, thought after thought and going deep and wide, without the fear of not knowing where and how to start.
I've created a free and open source Python library for Zettelkasten, with an implementation in Sublime Text for desktop and Pythonista for iOS.
https://urtext.co/
Urtext /ˈʊrtekst/ was developed over six years based on the original ideas of Niklas Luhmann
It is an open-source library for plaintext writing, research, documentation, knowledge bases, journaling, Zettelkasten, project/personal organization, note taking, a lightweight database substitute, or any other writing or information management that can be done in text format. With some Python knowledge you can practically run your entire life from Urtext.
We are actively seeking test users and will respond quickly to bug reports, feedback, documentation issues, and questions.
Thanks for your response to my question.
Sorry, it was just my careless word choice. No other intent...
Yeah, so whether to put an item in a ZK or not is essentially a decision on its existence or lack thereof, which necessarily also depends on how it exists (or not).
People employ different strategies in this regard. In a podcast episode, I remember Sönke Ahrens saying that he wouldn't bother taking notes of what he already knows; he would write to form new thoughts through conversing with himself and the system like Zettelkasten in place. Then, how should I place the materials that I'm intending to move from "what I don't know yet" to "what I already know"?
One focus of Zettelkasten is on meaning and connections, and purely from that stand point, I can see the benefit of including technical, fact-based snippets in Zettelkasten. However, the goal of Zettelkasten is not just learning facts. That's where I've been ambivalent about, i.e., how to place the kind of materials that I'm taking notes of to learn facts (and less to form new thoughts).
But your example provided me with an opportunity to shift my bias a bit:
People with teaching experience know that the process of preparing teaching materials is one of the best ways to learn. A constant pressure exists to acquire deeper knowledge than those to whom I am teaching. The iteration of writing, editing, and overall improving my materials creates the opportunities to identify the gap of knowledge within myself and where my understanding falls short.
Since Zettelkasten is writing-oriented, it occurred to me that I just need to create notes as if I’m writing a (text) book section on the topic. This way, I don’t have to worry about the mental block that I had about how certain things don’t neatly fit into the Zettelkasten paradigm.
In hindsight, it’s kinda obvious, but I somehow kept thinking that the process of learning is of less quality than that of creating, hence unworthy of residing in my Zettelkasten. I can still have Anki-style notes for rote-learning and/or spaced repetitions where appropriate, but for the materials I would rather or can learn through writing, I can put them into my Zettelkasten. This is good, as I’ve been trying to write more blog articles while I learn technical materials.
Well that's good for Sönke, but I think that's a really weird take. Especially when phrased as a "wouldn't", a recommendation of sorts. Do you have the episode link at hand so I can check how he phrases this?
Full disclosure, I don't have everything I know represented in my ZK. Just noticed this yesterday, when I wanted to link to the notion of a "null object" in programming. Turns out I use the phrase a lot, but it doesn't have an address in my ZK. I don't have a note with that topic -- for like, what now, 16 years that I know about this concept, or more?
So in practice, I do it like you paraphrased Sönke: I'm capable of working and thinking and stuff without having each and every piece externalized into my notes.
But it also diminishes what I get out of the system. I cannot link to a think (here: "null object"), so I cannot publish a blog post that references the notion, without having to look up the canonical reference there and then. For this forum post, the Wikipedia article more than suffices, but it still was 1 web search and cursory reading of the article I could've saved myself from doing if I had taken the time to write about this in my notes in the past.
Yesterday, I was a bit sad when I noticed that there's no "null object" note, because I also knew that I didn't have the time right then and there to fix the problem. And I didn't. I will do now, though, and apply Avoid Implicit Themes to my notes (Teaser for a ZK pattern language
). So that I can be more productive when publishing, and more accurate in my references in the future.
Taking how you paraphrase Sönke literally, I wouldn't take that time, or maybe even shouldn't, because I personally know about the concept, even though my ZK doesn't. This is just as weird as conversations with 2 humans become, when one party introduces a lot of technical terms, and eventually the other party is overwhelmed with jargon but didn't bother to ask for definitions early, hoping to follow along, and now is utterly confused. -- That's the same with publishing e.g. a blog post about what I did yesterday with an implicit reference to the "null object" concept, but then not explaining it (to my ZK). It won't get smarter about it.
I believe stressing this distinction more is useful, yes -- to differentiate "learning". Separating rote memorization from understanding a complex problem by working through it is both somewhat trivial (once you know about it) and important (because if you don't, you'll have a hard time). I can't imagine to work through any problem at all anymore, to be frank, without writing about it. Sometimes as a short 'dump' on my blog (which, in condensed form, goes back into my ZK) to start in a conversational way; often times in my ZK directly. So from how things work well for me, I'm happy for you
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
The snippet is accessible here: https://share.snipd.com/snip/59ac22b4-4253-4fda-96ab-69219e038a91
The full episode: https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/make-reading-more-meaningful-sonke-ahrens/
My goal is to improve my zettlekasten organization using structure notes. I also try to maintain a semblance of a workflow with 1writer, the archive, maestral dropbox, and apple notes. I'm still learning on this journey.
I've also been tinkering with the Readwise API and how to import my notes into the archive. Why? Well, I saw an Obsidian plugin for Readwise and thought it would be a fun side project for to share. I also wanted more atomic notes (1 note per zettle) instead of all of the hightlights in a book per note. I'm not sure that's wrong, but I per
As a mainframer, I decided to build it with ooREXX just to see if I can. REXX is good for prototyping and if it works, I can give it a shot in javascript for the plugin.
Reading
IBM redbook: CICS from Start to finish
Reading on ZOAU and python utilities for z/OS
Kang Only myself left to Conquer
Zettles
Many of these notes are fleeting notes for testing things out.
202505110813 How to make your nest egg last a lifetime: highlight 1
202504180925 Game Design Document for Bug B0p
202504170934 Game Design Document for Mainframe Training
202502192342 SOL System Overview
202502192339 SOL CLI Documentation
202502192313 Solomon Justus Truth Doctrine
202502192022 Solomon Justus Truth Doctrine
202502191720 Structure Note template
202502190842 Note Template
202502170638 SOL CLI Commands in ChatGpt
202412272047 Create ooREXX program to parse readwise export
202412081811 UniFi Remote Setup & SSH
202412081718 Structure Note: UniFi Technology
202412081708 What is a UniFi Cloud Gateway
202412081526 Structure Note: Memorable Quotes
202412032130 Structure Note: Notable Quotes from movies & Music
202411302144 REXX: Spaced Repititon for zettlekasten
If anyone wants to see any snippets of the ooREXX let me know.