Programming
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February’s main project is my notes on software development. I got a late start, so last week was week 2 of 3.
- I renamed the project’s wiki article from “From Private to Public Coding” to simply “Software Development.”
- I added a categorized bibliography of the SD books I’ve collected.
I meant to create an outline of the topics I want to cover, but I ran into multiple problems. Instead I’m going to break up the article’s current content into separate articles, start writing my software development procedure, and link to subtopic articles from the procedure.
I’m pleased with the troubleshooting I’ve been doing.
I finished Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. It was good, but somehow I was expecting more. Maybe it did all the mind opening I needed it for back when I first read it. Still, I’ll study it in more detail when I get around to organizing my information.
Deciding how to organize my software development notes has turned my attention to IEEE’s Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK), a free book you can download here. It’s an overview of the whole field, and so far it seems like a thorough and balanced starting point for studying the subject.
Research
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Recently an Amazon recommendation lodged itself in my mind and wouldn’t leave, a book called How to Take Smart Notes. It’s an exploration of the note-taking system of a prolific German sociologist named Niklas Luhmann. The system is called a Zettelkasten, or slip-box, and it’s sort of like a personal wiki. Here’s a video of a talk by the author. Here’s the book’s website. Here’s another writer’s explanation, and here’s another website dedicated to the system. An academic group studying Luhmann’s notes is here.
The reason the Zettelkasten method caught my attention is that it amounts to a more formalized and advanced version of the note-taking method I picked up last year from Peg Boyle Single’s Demystifying Dissertation Writing. It also overlaps with ideas from information architecture and semantic networks. And I always like methods that have communities that study and use them and share their findings.
Also I’ve run across Niklas Luhmann before. He was a systems theorist and wrote an introduction that I found early in my research. I haven’t read it though.
TV
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I’ve been catching up on Dark Matter. It’s a a space-based cyberpunk ensemble show adapted from a comic. I watched season 1 a few years ago, and I’ve missed it. Things that stand out to me now that I’m back:
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- I mainly care about the settings and the characters, but the show has a detailed political layer that would give it some rewatch value if I wanted to try to sort that all out.
- The set design and music match the genre perfectly.
