On graduating, I pictured myself blossoming into a voracious autodidact. Unlike those pesky pre-requisites scattered through college, the topics I’d dive into will be 100% my choice! Two years after graduation, I’m underwhelmed by my progress so far. This post examines my current predicament.
OneNote Notebooks
Fortunately, OneNote is not part of M365 else I would need to pay for continued access.
Useful for annotating primary sources. Handwritten annotations make me feel as if I’m actually learning something.
I don’t review the notebooks often because the content is too dense for a casual review.
Flashcards
Not sticky. Useful for interview prep, but my usage tapered off after getting a job. The flashcards feel like an unncessary duplication of my notes, given that I’m already transcribing important points from my OneNote to my blog.
Byte-Sized Courses
For example, this spreadsheet . The core theory here is focusing my efforts on a few topics for a couple of days, while tracking my overall progress on the topics.
Not sticky. The spreadsheet feels like too much overhead. I also lack conviction to commit to a given topic.
Personal Website
The content in my blog is distilled from my primary notes, e.g. OneNote notebooks, and book annotations. The major advantages of a personal website is the accessibility (only need a browser) and customizability (via Hugo).
Hard links are helpful when presenting the same content in different contexts, without incurring a syncing overhead e.g. modifying this page in the ELE 364 notes simultaneously modifies this page in the general ML notes .
The ability to also organize the content using metadata, e.g. tags , categories , domains , authors and recency , is nifty.
The Random Link ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ button is convenient because I find myself wanting
to review something, without needing to decide what that thing is.
Online Forums and RSS Subscriptions
Hacker News and Slashdot are my go-to forums. As a source of edification, Reddit has been lackluster of late.
My RSS subscriptions hover around tech, math, science, finance and philosophy . The main challenge has been too much content. My unread article count is north of 2,000 and I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.
Forums and RSS feeds have been useful for adding current connections to relatively timeless notes, e.g. here .
I started out with Jekyll, but the lack of a straightforward mapping between folders/files and the site’s pages drew me to Hugo.