About My Notes

About My Motivation

• I always believe in the notion that for you to truly understand, you must either teach or explain to others, so this digital garden is meant for that.

  • When I discover “learn in public” concept, I didn’t really believe in it (to some extent I still don’t). But one insight I always carry with me and has always been true to me, is that you cannot say you fully comprehend the subject until you try to teach it or explain it to others – Zettelkasten is meant for that.
  • I just wanted to take a step further to hold myself accountable (I’m sharing it publicly anyway) by publishing my notes to the general public

About My Notes and Its Content

Gems of My Digital Garden

• My work revolves around 00 Engineering Economics00 Engineering Economics
  #MOC / for economics notes with focus on petroleum fiscal and engineering
  and 00 Petroleum Engineering00 Petroleum Engineering
  #MOC / notes on petroleum and reservoir engineering (PE/RE) including resources classification
  , as such insights in those notes are my most valuable gems

  • For these, I capture mostly insights I gathered from my many years in the industry, so it won’t cover the basics or fundamental as much. But you’ll find references and links within the notes for that.
• As I expand my core skills, I find myself venturing into big data analysis and with that I gather notes on 00 Statistics00 Statistics
  #MOC / Hub for notes related to general statistical knowledge
  and 00 Coding00 Coding
  #MOC / for programming language, coding guide and libraries focusing on data analytics and html/css
  (VBA, Python and R)
  • I’m in no way an expert in statistics, my learning is ongoing but focus is on big data related. So my notes will be a bit on novice side with few might venture into somewhat complex.
  • For Coding, most of it will be reference notes (for me to reuse in other projects)

The Tools I Use

• My notes on tools and apps are productivity related and mostly a reference note for my future self (or perhaps another person encountering similar problem)

  • These tools are usually used to support my work (that form the gems above), so they are auxiliary in nature – to help me to get the work done
  • Occasionally, I ventured further that they become key part of my hobby like learning HTML and CSS (and developing CSS snippets for Obsidian)

• Here are list of tools and apps I use and what kind of notes I take about them

  • Excel and VBA are my primary apps at work, so there’re some good pointers on how I use VBA/macro to ease my life.
    • I don’t anything on PowerPoint even though I use it daily as well as Excel because there’s nothing insightful I can offer – almost all I know, you can simply google it.
  • I use 01 Obsidian01 Obsidian
    #MOC / for Obsidian.md related references
    for my personal knowledge management. Where I capture my insights on the areas/topics laid out in this note.
  • I’ve been tinkering with Github (repo and pages) and Jekyll for sharing my code snippets and hosting my website / digital garden,
    • There are a bit of both, references and insights, on using/adding mathjax (math equation), mermaid diagram, and markdown related to my content creation.
      • my css snippets – MLC snippets for Obsidian
      • my personal website – efemkay.github.io), and
      • my digital garden – Efemkay's Digital Garden

About How I Write

• I write my notes in outline (bullet points) because I believe the structure helps guide my thinking for my note making to focus on key idea

  • I’m a working engineer, consequentially, I’m trained to be concise. As such my notes reflect that personality of mine.
    • But it doesn’t mean the notes are short (unnecessarily), that a 3rd person won’t understand). It primarily means the key points are the top bullet, with sub-bullets represents the elaboration
    • As you can see I love proper sentences, so you can expect so in my notes.

• As much as possible, I titled my notes in a complete phrase, as a summary to the main idea

  • Prefer Note Titles with Complete PhrasePrefer Note Titles with Complete Phrase
    
    summary from Andy Matuschak’s note
    
    
    
    
    Complete phrases as note title forces us to be convicted with the statement
    
    Evergreen or permanent notes should be concept-oriented
    ...
  • I find it helpful for me as I’m forced to position what is the value of the note – if I cannot, it simply means it is too broad to be useful or I don’t fully understand the idea