🇫🇷 Version française ici

I would probably never write in French, but this first post is a bit special and I originally wrote it in my native language.

🧠Welcome to my second brain

I’ve always felt like I don’t have a good memory.

That might be true, and perhaps that’s what pushed me to start taking notes on everything, literally everything📝📝📝
At first, it felt like a necessity and with time I convinced myself that it had become a bad habit that made my brain retain less and less.

Then, after a while (and a few hundred notes), I began to realize the power of having access to a ton of personal notes and the more I used them, the more I understood that I could never have remembered everything on my own.
My notes had become what I started calling “my second brain"🧠

Fun fact: I was surprised to learn that others had used the same term for the same need!
There are even books on the subject!

But let’s go back to that time of intense note-taking when I realized I had misunderstood myself because taking all those notes didn’t stop me from continuing to train my brain🏋️🧠
Not because I was afraid of losing more memory, but because I wanted to do it, maybe even because I enjoyed it.
Indeed, I kept learning professionally📖, kept playing video games🎮, chess♟️, sudoku🧩, etc., I’d come up with little tricks to remember everyday things, in short, my brain never stopped training :)

Now let’s get to the main point of this page: What notes tool should you use?
Big question, because many tools available!🤯
📓There are the basic tools like notebooks, agendas, notepads.
🖥️Then there are dozens, if not hundreds, of digital tools: connected apps, websites, cloud services, etc.

But here’s the thing: I have only few criteria and they are really simple.
Yet, they’re essential to me and they require a well-crafted tool to be satisfied.

Here they are:

🏠 A self-hosted tool
🔄 A tool that can sync all my notes across disparate devices
🌍 A tool that allows me to access and edit my notes from anywhere
🔗 Bonus: If I can share my notes easily it’s a big plus :)
(spoiler: my first share is accessible from this page!)

Let me explain:

🏠I want a self-hosted tool because I don’t like being dependent on a (usually paid) service where I can’t control my data.
Many apps like Notion are available online and are actually really nice and powerful, but we don’t have control over our data. I want to be the master, the one responsible for it, and the one who ensures its security. This is not paranoia (I don’t even store sensitive data in my notes); it’s just that a webpage isn’t enough to convince me that my data is safe. I’m not convinced it can’t be read by a third party and if it happens, I might not even know about it, but more importantly, I don’t have the guarantee that my data will always be accessible.
I could give examples to illustrate this point, but that’s not the topic…
🔄I want a tool that can sync all my notes across various devices, because I use multiple devices with different OS.
I mostly take notes on my PC, but it’s also very convenient to quickly grab my smartphone and know everything is synchronized.
Without that, I would end up with many notes on each device and spend my time copying them back and forth, managing folders, file names, duplicates, versioning…
In short, it would be a nightmare😱 and instead of enjoying the tool, I would be scary to use it.
🌍I want my notes to be accessible from anywhere, because I often need them from a device that isn’t mine (especially for work) and I can’t be wasting time looking for a note on one of my personal devices, then figuring out how to send it, by email, by message or something else.
That’s a pain, it wastes time, sometimes it’s even a real issue (again, mostly for work). In short, I want to respect my favorite motto:

🧘‍♂️"simple and efficient”

So this has been one of my biggest quests for years. I tried tons of apps📦, online services☁️, hacks🤖, but none ever met all my simple criteria.

Until one day… I started using my first brain to do what the second one can’t do: think🧠
Not about building my own tool because I don’t have the time or the skills, but about how I could combine existing tools to create a “workflow” that would finally satisfy this long-standing desire :)

This combination🧬, both personal and demanding (I think), is summarized in a rather simple diagram:

my_second_brain

Obsidian is, for me, today, the best note-taking app.
And I can say that after trying tons of them, I find that it is by far the most complete, the most practical, the most customizable, etc. (the list of superlatives would be too long).
I admit that I tried it several times and never got hooked until recently. Indeed, it seems austere and too basic at first glance but this is in fact its strength because it finally has a rather simple design starting with the content: one note = one file!
It may sound silly said like that but it allows you to have a completely transparent tool unlike many others.
We finally edit what is in our storage (with a few minor exceptions) which makes things very simple and allows us to do everything I have been able to do and which is described in the diagram.
It’s multi-OS which is perfect, but it doesn’t sync (unless you pay for the editor’s cloud service).

That’s where Syncthing comes in!
Here too, I’ve tried many tools to sync various things in my digital life and I think this one is the best for that need.
I’ve almost never had sync conflicts and when I did, they were fixed with one click.
It syncs multiple devices (not just two, where rsync would have been sufficient) and it’s also multi-OS.
In short, the best!

So now I have a note-taking tool that works on all my devices and syncs with every change.
Cool! But I also want to access my notes from anywhere, even on devices I don’t own, and be able to modify them, remember.
Yeah, I know, I’m pushing it… And yet, there’s a tool that does exactly that, simply and efficiently (best motto ever :)
His name? The incredible tool developed by Linus Torvalds in less than 3 days: Git!
More specifically, GitLab in my case.
(You can obviously use GitHub or any code managing platform based on Git)

And then there’s the “bonus” part, without which you wouldn’t be reading me right now (or at least not as easily).
Imagine being able to share a note, some code, an image, or whatever else, and allow anyone to access it as easily as opening a webpage…
That’s what’s happening with the page you’re reading right now :)

Problem: the notes are in Markdown format in Obsidian (I repeat, best note format ever).

So how do you display them on a website? That’s exactly what Hugo does!
“Simple and efficient”, once it’s configured, you just run the hugo command and… that’s it!
Yep, that’s all! The website is generated from Markdown files converted into static HTML pages :)

Which means that with just a bit of automation, I can share any note, from anywhere.

And all of that with a simple copy-paste! 🤯
And you know what? Not only did I not have to do anything else for my note to be shared, but on top of that, every time I modify my file in Obsidian, the webpage is automatically updated in real-time (🤯🤯).

At last, I’ve found my Holy Grail🏆

…and I’m sharing my personal tutorial🛠️ that I wrote during the installation because remember:
✍️I write everything down!