Building a Second Brain with Notion

For the past year I have been building my second brain¹ in Notion. I use Notion daily to store web clippings, research and meeting notes for work, the books I read, book highlights² and notes, and even the upcoming movies and TV shows that I want to watch. The Notion database provides a great user experience for capturing, filtering and sorting lists of data like that.

Background

My immediate family (8 of us total) has a private chat group using the GroupMe app ¹ that we have been using for a couple of years now. When we first started using GroupMe for our chat, I was happy because it offered an API that you use to enhance the group chat. So I played around with it one weekend and the hansenbot was created.

The hansenbot is a pretty simple django app that exposes a hook URL that you can setup that GroupMe will forward all messages in your group to. I created the hansenbot to respond to certain commands that are typed in the group chat that have the following form: !hb <command> where !hb tells the bot that the given message is a command that it needs to respond to and <command> is one of the preconfigured commands that I created that report information back to the GroupMe group. These commands I created range from telling “dad jokes”, giving current weather information for all the locations where my family lives and information about the next upcoming birthday.

Problem

In my professional career, from time to time, I get forwarded an email, out of the blue from a colleague, and this email has a message that reads “Hey Wes, can you do this for me?”. Following this seemingly simple message is a week-long thread of thirty emails between several people and I am the lucky individual who gets added to the chain in hopes that I can resolve the issue.

Book Review

This is my review (and notes) of the book Docs for Developers: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing by Jared Bhatti, Zachary Sarah Corleissen, Jen Lambourne, David Nunez, and Heidi Waterhouse. I purchased this book because I am passionate about good developer docs. I can easily spot good developer docs while working on a project but find it hard to write them myself in a way that is useful to myself and others. This is a skill that I want to get better at so I thought that this book would help.

Technology

This blog is written in markdown and uses the Hugo static site generator. I found a nice minimalist theme called terminal that styles the site the way you see here.

Deployment

For simplicity and ease-of-use, I decided to host this blog on github pages and take advantage of free static site hosting. You can find the contents of this blog in the following repo: link. It’s easy to use because github automatically builds and deploys anytime you merge a new commit to the main branch.