Personal Notes

Everyone have their own way for learning stuff, and the best way for me is by writing it down by hand. However, writing by hand inside a note or using a piece of paper is truly inconvenient:

• We can't bring that book anywhere. We can't access it anytime except if we bring the book
• It is not easy to open a book in random places
• It is hard to manage many information inside a single book, because if we are writing different subjects at the same time, we should separate the contents, maybe by using a bookmark or split different subjects to different books, otherwise the content will messed up and not in order
• It is inconvenient if we need to update on information that we already written down before. We know technology is rapidly changing, and update to the previous information often happen because of it
• It is rather hard to writing code or tech illustration inside a book
• Finding information from our book would take a long time

So those reasons are what brings me to this idea: making a knowledge database system that is accessible from the internet. This knowledge based will be mainly used by myself, but other can use it too. To implement this idea, several considerations remain, and this is my answer to these questions:

1. I want to make the knowledge database accessible from anywhere anytime, both from my phone or my PC. So the answer is just use Web
2. I want to make the process of writing and creating content for the knowledge based easy to access and easy to write. We all know computer science and IT related fields require a lot of mathematics. So to solve this, we will use a technology framework (well technically a typewriting language) of Latex. But how do we develop a web app using Latex/showing Latex? Turns out, Markdown have the capability of embedding Latex using $$ sign. We all know we can convert Markdown into HTML (well both using Markup language eventually), so we can write our content using Markdown, and then convert it into HTML that can be deployed. So our answer for these problem is by using Markdown
3. We all know there are many text editor out there: VSCode, Vim, Atom, Notepad++, SublimeText... you named it. But I want to be able to make the content from phone, something that can't be fulfilled by using regular text editor. Then I remember, that I want to take a note in the first place, not coding. So i want to make the experience of writing Markdown just the same as taking notes. Then I started searching for notes editor that have Markdown capability. That's when I found out about Obsidian. It is open source, free to use, have many plugins, and cross-platform — every IT dream of software.
4. Next problem is the database location. Well if we want to make our knowledge database online, we also need to store the content on the internet. Most of the object storage is not free and not easy to access/edit. But, why bother using expensive or extensive object storage such as AWS S3, Cloudflare S2, when we have Github repository to store our files. Well technically the point of code repository is to store code, but if we can use Git for the version control system for our knowledge, Git integration with Obsidian, and Github to store the files freely, why not using it? Additional big bonus: Github support Github pages, free deployment for static website! Need more bonuses? Github support Jekyll! We can convert Markdown into HTML in just one push! Talking about push, Github also have their own CI/CD pipeline! 5 tasks completed just by choosing Git and Github with integration into Obsidian.

So those are step by step how I want to make my knowledge database system, their problems and how I solve it. And that's brings us to Personal Notes. I have no elite or nerdy name for it, but hey, it does the work done and everyone will notice what it is for by seeing their name, right?

You can access my personal notes through this site: https://bagassambega.github.io/PersonalNotes/