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.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.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.