My notes

A brief history of my approach to note taking.

High school

While in high school, I was taking lots of MOOCs (most of them about AI and ML) and reading some technical books, but I did not have a systematic approach to note taking: I used to focus only on exercises and applications.

Here lie some remains of my high school notes.

Undergrad

My attitude changed as I started attending lessons for an undergraduate degree in mathematics. During that time I found out different ways to efficiently schematize and organize the presented maths theory, but it was mostly pen and paper work.

Some copybooks and folders filled with maths.

IT industry

Now that I’m in the IT industry I’ve come back to ebooks and video lessons, so I decided to take digital notes, which come with several benefits:

• Have you ever forgot something that you took note of? Just upload your notes to the cloud to read them every time you want to.
• The cloud will also help you add new notes to your collection without messy synchronization processes.
• You can include any kind of hypermedia (e.g. cool diagrams, links to external resources) with ease.
• It’s easier to share digital notes with other people.

So I came up with this setup:

• Notes format: I’m using Markdown to quickly write well-formatted and readable notes.
• Site builder: Mkdocs (with the material theme) generates a good-looking static website from the Markdown I write.
• Source control: Public git repository owned by my personal GitHub account.
• Hosting: GitHub Pages, amazing service which is offering free HTTPS certificates too (thanks to Let’s Encrypt).

Some pages of my notes website.

This setup grants all the previously listed benefits, while being agile enough to let you write notes on the fly.

I like to keep my notes open because I hope they could prove useful for someone out there. Also, if you spot errors of any kind, you’re welcome to open a pull request to fix them.

Have a look at my notes here if you’re interested.