I've tried to incorporate some of the ideas of the "second brain" and it didn't really give me that much. My lessons:
1. It's always super helpful to write things down. Taking notes from what I read/learn is a great way to verify that I understand it. It sharpens my thinking.
2. However, maintaining the "second brain" is a lot work. It's not only about "linking" together notes. You also need to maintain some consistency between them. I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about the structure instead of actually thinking about the content.
3. Most of my notes/thoughts fall into two categories: (1) Either they are critical for something I'm actively working on or (2) it's just loose concepts that I'm toying with. For (1) I immediately end up playing with it in code — which is far more concrete and tangible than notes. And for (2) it was rarely important to retain the knowledge accurately many weeks/months later.
What I've ended up with is taking a lot of notes, but I hardly focus on organizing them.
> I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about the structure instead of actually thinking about the content.
This is why wikis, which I originally thought were just the best things ever, seem to become useless over time.
The Mac application Quiver [1] introduced me to the idea of categories, which can contain one layer of sub-category, and either categories or sub-categories can contain articles, which contain text. A really simple tree.
This extremely simple structure is just enough to (A) contain everything I've thrown at it and (B) know where to look for something. And, you can make links from one article to another for when a cross-reference is good to have (but I do it very rarely).
I now use Obsidian [2] which is more modern, not Mac only, as well as being much simpler to use than Quiver, using simple markdown.
I thought about it and my minimum requirements for a knowledge graph tool are:
1. Edit files in vanilla Markdown (no application specific cruft)
2. Be able to search content easily (ideally via grep)
3. Add 1:1 or 1:many links between files (direct links vs. tags, ideally using requirement 2 to implement this)
And the simplest solution for me was:
1. A single level directory of md files (no folders!)
2. Vim + Telescope [1]
3. A small set of guidelines [2] to define searchable patterns for linking files/nodes
I also wrote a little md renderer (seen in link 2) that adds the features I wanted for exploring my notes/second brain in a browser that picks up on the patterns in the guidelines. Gotta get a grep search on that thing and it'll be golden, but I apologize I'm rambling at this point.
Never been happier. I just use Working Copy to jot notes on mobile when I'm not at my computer.
[0] https://help.obsidian.md/How+to/Internal+link