[bleeding]

I've tried to use a "personal wiki" in professional life and found that I did not really use the functionality. What re-occurring concepts need to be linked back to? AWS? APIs? Perhaps I'm just not a very good professional note-taker, but my brief experimentation didn't really feel useful.

What I _have_found it very useful for is D&D notes. People, places, objects come up on a re-occurring basis and it is often useful to have a description, encounters, relationships to other people/places/things in a page, or even just a place to list all of those things! You can easily go from session journal -> a bunch of new pages about things, or updates to existing ones in a brief review after the session. It took me a while to actually do the organization but the upkeep is now easy, and I will have a place to recall the name of the inn we we stayed at in our first session in Fantasyville.

[titanomachy]

I started using one professionally and found it fairly helpful. Mostly I just type all my meeting notes and useful things I discover into my daily notes, and try to tag the top-level node with at least the name of the project and maybe the people I’m meeting with. Then I can go to the project page and see a history of the discussion, which has been helpful on numerous occasions: instead of “I think I remember someone saying that foo service is going to be deprecated soon”, I can tell my teammates “Alice from the baz team told me two months ago that foo service will be deprecated in favor of bar, here’s a link to the doc outlining the reasons”. Probably 80% of the benefit just comes from having searchable daily notes, but the linking is pretty nice too.

Also helpful in 1:1s with people, I can easily see a record of all interactions I’ve had with a person so it reminds me to follow up on things when we chat.

[1123581321]

If you're deep into something like AWS at work, it seems useful to tag all the individual services you encounter in your work so you have a record of where you've used it or investigated using it. One tag for AWS doesn't sound useful. A tag structure like AWS-EC2 should let you search for every service without one overarching tag.

This kind of thing is best done in a collaborative tool, of course.