Why a Personal Knowledge Base?

Software engineer Thomas Kainrad has written a thought-provoking post about how he organizes such things as on-line information, software code, and his notes into a personal knowledge base. I am not a software engineer, but I found value in his post and think others can, too.

I've seen and even bandied the term about before, but had never seen a definition, so let's cite his:

Image by Campaign Creators, via Unsplash, license.

It is hard to imagine any other field where lifelong learning is more important than in software engineering. Another unique characteristic is the degree to which learning material is available for free on the internet. On top of that, we create various resources ourselves by documenting issues, submitting bug reports, writing notes, creating documentation, and many others. The sum of all these resources can be called a knowledge base. You could argue that every developer has a system to manage their personal knowledge base, whether they know it or not. In this post, I explain my knowledge management practices. [bold added]

After Kainrad warns against intermingling one's own data with that which should remain separate for various reasons, he discusses the kinds of information he uses and his system for organizing it, often describing the software he uses. Your mileage will vary, as they say. I don't see myself adopting the same database software, on the one hand. On the other hand, his level of detail about organizing notes will help me tackle some issues I have noticed in my own organizational scheme.

He concludes in part:

Similar posts often conclude with warnings that you should be very careful not to spend too much time on organizing and maintaining your knowledge and workflows. In principle, I agree with this sentiment. After all, you want to increase your productivity.

I do believe, however, that it is worth it to spend some time thinking about your knowledge management system. The most important part about conceptualizing a system is to decide exactly which types of information you want to maintain in your knowledge base. If you get this right you will benefit for the rest of your career. Even if the tools might change in the future, the system will stay. [bold added]

This is true, and all I would add is to state explicitly something that I think is only implicit in the post: You can't nail everything down at once. Your workflow and system will evolve over time as you learn more and your needs change. Perhaps the most important thing is a disciplined commitment to being organized, and an eye for figuring out and making the changes that will have the most benefit. In my experience, at least HAVING a system in place, however imperfect, makes improvement easy and permanent, however incremental it might be.

-- CAV