Zettelkasten for Programmers: Pick a Title. It’s Okay to Change Later

If you look over my shoulder as I process stuff into my Zettelkasten, dear programmer friend, you may read along and then scream in terror: How can you pick such a title? It’s clear as day that this won’t be good for long! Just think of … and … to realize that the title needs to be improved! Programmers worth their salt are notorious to focus on edge cases, much to the dismay of non-programmers around them, who fail to see the relevance to be that accurate and all-encompassing when it comes to everyday things. Sorry: That’s part of our job, that’s a reflex you won’t get us to unlearn.

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Redirect Output to Buffers from Emacs Eshell

With Emacs eshell, you can redirect the standard output of shell programs into buffers: That will use existing buffers and create new buffers as needed. For me, the new buffers would not be switched to automatically, but created in the background. You don’t pipe into a buffer function, but redirect the output like you’d redirect file output. Instead of a file on disk, you specify a buffer with the special form:

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Protesilaos Stavrou Asks (Me) About Indie Development, Art, Philosophy, Zettelkasten

I had the absolute pleasure to talk to Protesilaos Stavrou. He is such a nice host, permitting to derail his line of topics and inquiries over and over again, and still enjoying the process. 11/10, can recommend.

YouTube: Prot Asks: Christian about indie dev, philosophy of experiences, Zettelkasten

The constant here is: work.
– Prot

  • We started chatting about development, and being an independent vs freelancer;
  • 2000’s/2010’s discovery of attention grabbing techniques on the web; and how interaction, not attention, is the better currency of monetization;
  • “build it and they will come”, the bane of independent development;
  • working with a Zettelkasten, writing and thinking over long periods of time, keeping your thoughts organized (e.g. for a PhD thesis or other complex project); how you, the user, are the stateful machine that interprets notes over and over like a computer interprets code for execution;
  • Luhmann’s theory of dynamic (social) systems.