Initial Thoughts on a Personal Wiki

Approximately two weeks ago, I wrote a blog post where I mentioned that I was interested in setting up a personal wiki, or something similar, as a way to keep an online commonplace book. I’ve been taking notes on the idea ever since, and today, I finally decided to give it a try.

Requirements

I had a few different requirements.

1. Easy to maintain & use
2. Markdown support
3. Accessible and editable on all devices
4. Web-based, so that I’m not handling syncing between devices
5. FOSS

Enter Wiki.js

After a decent amount of research, where I looked at pretty much every FOSS solution for a personal wiki, I settled on Wiki.js. There were a couple of features that lured me in.

Distractions and Time Tracking

Do you ever that weird feeling at the end of the day, when you know you were extremely busy, but you can’t point to any one thing you accomplished? Or do you occasionally wonder where all of your time has gone, and what the distractions were that kept you from accomplishing your tasks & goals?

As someone who loves studying productivity and ways to improve myself, those thoughts come up frequently. As in, on a more-than-once-a-week basis. When the thoughts reach a critical peak I generally try to do something about it, and improve my productivity. Sometimes my changes stick; sometimes they don’t.

VSCode for Markdown

Short post again today, unfortunately. Today, and this week in general, have been super busy. But a few quick thoughts today.

For most of my software development (C/C++) I prefer to use Sublime Text. I know it’s not FOSS, but it’s one of the better text editors I’ve ever found, and at this point I’m so used to it that it would be a pain to change (not that I don’t still consider it from time to time). And it works equally well on every platform I’ve ever tried.

Refactoring

Another short post today.

I’ve spent a large portion of the last few weeks refactoring code at work. For those not in the software industry, refactoring basically means cleaning up/reworking how a piece of software works, without changing the external behavior. Sometimes it’s simplifying the logic. Sometimes it’s renaming things to make comprehension easier. Sometimes it’s removing unused features. Sometimes it’s moving duplicate code to a common implementation.

I’ve been doing all of the above. It’s tedious at times. It’s fun at times. And it normally makes me feel good once it’s done. But it got me wondering… why don’t we use the same word in real life? For instance: if I’m reorganizing stuff in a room to make it easier to access? Sounds like refactoring to me. Or how about migrating from a few different note taking tools/methods to a single format? In other words, all of the small modifications/improvements that I make to my daily life that don’t change the end result, but improve the workflow… is kind of refactoring.

Motivation

Author’s Note: I want to apologize ahead of time to the reader if this is incoherent. I have a ton of thoughts today on this topic, and they may not translate well to the written page.

Today is one of those days where I’m struggling with motivation. That’s not to say I’m not motivated. I have a number of things that are on my mind that I could happily work on. Unfortunately, none of those include a few projects for work that I really need to work on.