Evergreen
Learning When Everything Wants Your Attention
Information is everywhere and almost none of it sticks. Learn less, one thing at a time, then write, build and share — and design your environment so focus is the default.
Learning systems
$ cd ./topics/learning-systems
Learning systems
Second brains, spaced repetition and the daily loop that turns scattered notes into knowledge I can actually use. This site is its visible end.
17 notes🌱 3 seed🌿 12 growing🌳 2 evergreen
This garden is the visible end of a learning system. During the day I log anything worth noticing. In the evening an AI assistant helps me distil what’s worth keeping and file it. And older ideas resurface on a spaced schedule so they get another look. Some of those notes grow up and end up here.
Notes in this topic cover that loop (capture, distil, resurface), the methods it borrows from, and how to learn anything when everything is competing for your attention.
Start here
- How I Take Notes: Capture, Distil, Resurface: the whole system, end to end.
- LOGREDIS: Log, Review, Discover. The loop underneath it.
- Comprehension Requires Your Own Words: the test for whether you’ve really understood something.
Capture and distil
- LOGREDIS: frictionless capture, regular review, everything rediscoverable.
- Zettelkasten: small, linked, permanent notes in your own words.
- The Second Brain: why keep an external system at all.
Remember and resurface
- Spaced Repetition: testing plus time, for facts and for whole notes.
- Comprehension Requires Your Own Words: you can only recall what you understood.
Attention and priorities
- Learning When Everything Wants Your Attention
- Eisenhower Matrix: protect the important-not-urgent work.
- You Can’t Serve Two Masters: one goal at a time, in training and in learning.
- Skill Trees as Platform Capability Maps: learning paths you can see.
Open questions I’m exploring
- How much of the “distil” step can an assistant do before I stop learning from it?
- Can spaced resurfacing work for half-formed ideas, not just finished notes?
- What’s the right threshold for publishing a seed? Too early is noise; too late and it never happens.
- Building a Graph Component Library
- Comprehension Requires Your Own Words
- Deloads Are Tech-Debt Sprints
- Eisenhower Matrix
- FLP Impossibility
- Git Worktrees: A Desk per Branch
- Golden Paths
- Golden Paths and the Recommended Routine
- Graph Visualisation Libraries
- Hacking Forums as Learning Communities
- How I Take Notes: Capture, Distil, Resurface
- Hypertrophy and Skill Phases: Build vs Harden Cycles
- Internal Developer Platform
- Learning When Everything Wants Your Attention
hover to explore · click to open
🌳 Start here
- Evergreen
LOGREDIS
Log, Review, Discover. Capture with as little friction as possible, review regularly to spot patterns, and make sure every note can be rediscovered later. The loop that runs my second brain.
Learning systems
Still growing (15)
- Growing
Comprehension Requires Your Own Words
If you can't explain an idea in your own words, you haven't understood it yet. You've only followed along. Writing it down is how you find out.
Learning systems - Growing
Eisenhower Matrix
Sort work by urgent and important. Do, schedule, delegate, delete. Most real progress lives in "important but not urgent", which is exactly the quadrant that gets squeezed out.
Learning systems - Seed
Hacking Forums as Learning Communities
Game hacking and modding forums are, first of all, places where people learn — sharing tools, tutorials and status. The same dynamics that make them great teachers raise the question of where the learning leads.
Learning systems - Growing
How I Take Notes: Capture, Distil, Resurface
From a university Zettelkasten to a second brain with an AI librarian — I only capture now, and the system distils, links and brings old ideas back on a schedule.
Learning systems - Growing
Mining Reddit for Research
Reddit's topic-focused communities make it a rich research source. How to collect posts with PRAW and an archive, how to clean them, and the ethics that keep individuals out of your results.
Platform engineering - Growing
Online Communities and Interaction Spaces
What actually makes an online community — shared purpose, interaction, norms, a platform — and why "member" and "participant" aren't the same thing. The literature behind how I framed forum research.
Learning systems - Growingproject
Pathways into Cybercrime
My final-year dissertation at Kent. Can topic modelling and network analysis of online communities show whether game hacking and cheating forums lead people towards more serious hacking? The question, the approach, the ethics, and what I'd do differently with today's LLMs.
Platform engineering - Seed
Procrastination
Procrastination is emotion management, not laziness. Reduce the friction with a clear, small next step and a protected block of time to start it.
Learning systems - Growingmetaphor
Skill Trees as Platform Capability Maps
Draw a platform roadmap like a calisthenics skill tree — prerequisites, tiers and mastery levels — so it's obvious what's locked until the foundations are in.
Calisthenics Lab - Growing
Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is testing plus time. Recall something just as you're about to forget it, at growing intervals, and it sticks for months with far less effort than cramming.
Learning systems - Growing
The Second Brain
Your brain is good at having ideas and bad at storing them. A trusted external system for what you learn means you never start from scratch, and ideas get recycled instead of lost.
Learning systems - Growing
Typing Speed and a Keyboard-First Setup
From 60 wpm hunt-and-peck to 100+ touch typing, a detour through Colemak and back, and the split-keyboard, mouse-free setup I use now.
Frontend craft - Seed
Why People Legitimise Hacking
People are more willing to see hacking as legitimate when they feel a system or authority won't listen to them, and they're angry about it. A psychology finding with uncomfortable lessons for organisations.
Learning systems - Growingmetaphor
You Can't Serve Two Masters
Specialise for a block. Two or three goals at a time beat ten — in training, where goals compete for recovery, and in teams, where they compete for attention.
Calisthenics Lab - Growing
Zettelkasten
A slip box of small, linked, permanent notes written in your own words. The value isn't storage; it's the connections you're forced to make, and the surprises they produce later.
Learning systems
On the radar
- Astro adopt
- Claude Code adopt
- Context engineering for coding agents adopt