build a library
Eight months ago I started dumping everything I read into Apple Notes. Every day. At the end of the month I review it, keep what's worth keeping, merge it into a file, push it to a forge. That's it.
I didn't do this to build a "second brain". I wanted to solve a simpler problem: remember what I read.
A few months later, something else started happening. I had references. When talking with teammates or friends, I could quickly pull papers, blog posts, talks or examples. Now, instead of vaguely remembering ideas, I had the actual source. One of the reasons I started this blog too. I share my own posts frequently and my posts have references.
Over time, patterns started appearing. I now have clusters of extremely good writing around testing, distributed systems, concurrency, observability, error handling and databases. Problems I work on, problems I'm interested in or just really cool stuff.
Not because I organized them upfront. Because interesting ideas naturally accumulate. That's the part I didn't plan. At some point you stop having a collection of links. You have a library. Libraries give you superpowers.
You start seeing recurrent ideas, different people reaching similar conclusions, concepts evolving over time and people you admire. You also build taste. In software engineering taste matters because programming is an art. See what I did there? That's from my library.