Tech — Work — Ramblings

by Mike Kalvas

I see you're not using JavaScript (which is awesome!) on one of my pages that uses it to provide a better experience. If you see something not working right, please let me know. My site should work exactly the same without it apart from any exceptions noted here.

I use prism.min.js to do syntax highlighting. It clocks in at 23kb total in size. Since the majority of the writing I do involves coding, I personally find this to be a worthwhile trade off. If you choose to keep this disabled, rest assured, the code examples are still there, they just may have some extra whitespace and obviously no syntax highlighting.

I do no tracking at all and am a zealot about keeping my pages as small as possible. If you're reading a page of mine that transfers more than about 250kb over the wire (including my most gratuitous indulgence — fonts) I've messed up.

So, if you'd like to have a slightly richer experience, consider enabling javascript for my site and I promise your trust won't be misplaced.

202109091129 Evergreen notes

Valuable notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects (202109060836 Knowledge should accumulate). This is different than taking transient notes because 202209091140 Transient notes don't create knowledge.¹ 202209091141 The goal of note-taking is not to be better at taking notes, it's to be better at thinking. In order to make notes valuable we need them to be timeless.²

We can make our notes timeless by making sure that they adhere to a few key principles:

202209091142 Notes are the fundamental unit of knowledge work. This practice is similar and different to Niklas Luhmann's 202107272242 The Art of using a Zettelkasten.³

Khoe, M.-L. (2016, December 21). Messy thought, neat thought [Tumblr]. Tumblr. https://klr.tumblr.com/post/154784481858/messy-thought-neat-thought ↩
Matuschak, A. (2017). Evergreen notes. Andyʼs Working Notes. https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z4SDCZQeRo4xFEQ8H4qrSqd68ucpgE6LU155C ↩
Luhmann, N. (2021, September 9). Communicating with Slip Boxes by Niklas Luhmann (M. Kuehn, Trans.). https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes ↩