The Problem

After two years of studying computer science and working with various technologies, I realized I was starting to forget things I had already learned. Computer science — like any other field — is vast, and it’s simply impossible to remember everything.

This became frustrating. I often found myself searching for the same topic multiple times. My first idea was to write things down. I had some experience with handwritten notes from when I was learning Android development, and while those notes were genuinely useful (they even helped me in interviews), the approach had clear limitations:

• It was time-consuming.
• It required a lot of paper, which was hard to organize and keep.
• Searching for a specific topic was difficult.
• There was no way to link related topics together.

Notion

While looking for a better solution, I discovered Notion. At the time of writing (August 2022), Notion is one of the best online platforms for students to take notes and organize information. I can’t speak to how well it works as a company-wide documentation tool, but for individual use, it was highly effective. With Notion, I could:

• Take notes in an interactive environment and access them from any device.
• Create, delete, or modify as many pages as I wanted.
• Search through all my pages instantly.
• Create cross-references between related topics.

Obsidian

Notion served me well, and I used it daily. However, a couple of things kept bothering me:

• The loading time when searching for a term.
• The delay when switching between pages.

To be fair, Notion is a solid product, and I still use it. But as a web-based, cross-platform application, it has inherent performance trade-offs.

Being the optimization-obsessed person I am, I started looking for alternatives. I found two promising open-source applications: Obsidian and MarkText, both built with JavaScript. I tried MarkText first because of its clean editing interface, but it turned out to be buggy in certain scenarios. Then I switched to Obsidian — and was immediately drawn to its graph view, a visually appealing way to see connections between notes.

Beyond the graph view, Obsidian offers practical features like vertical and horizontal split panes for working with multiple notes at once. Despite being built with JavaScript, it feels remarkably fast — almost like a native application.

The MyNotes Repository

Since May 17, 2022, I’ve been maintaining the MyNotes repository — my “second brain.” It contains all of my notes and documentation across the topics I’ve studied. This repository keeps me motivated because I can see how much I’ve learned over time, and it saves me from having to re-research topics I’ve already covered.