How to Build a Knowledge Base You'll Actually Use
You’ll gather a growing archive of insights as your career unfolds. Not all of it matters, but keeping it pays off later.
Think of it as a living garden: optional, yes, but overflowing with rewards when you care for it. Each note you write is a new seedling, every restructure is pruning for growth, and every link is cross-pollination that lets ideas bloom.
Sometimes it’s just about role definitions, job ads, or finding the right tool. You could Google it again, but it’s faster to reuse your own notes.
Twice, I joined startups where I needed to come up with the initial role definitions for the tech department. The first time, it took a handful of meetings, because we hashed it out as a team and dug into the research. The second time, I just reused my earlier definitions as a starting point and adapted as needed.
It took me an afternoon to develop a presentation for the department. I told my team, “This is a first draft. We can use these roles if you like them, or come up with something better.” Starting with a baseline kept us focused on what we needed to adapt to fit our culture.
You need to keep notes and journals to leverage all this knowledge. Skip it and you’ll forget. What was the analytics tool called that you liked a couple of years ago? Which PEN testing companies provide reasonable and affordable services? It’s no different from planting and weeding to keep your garden thriving.
You could ping a friend, but it is faster to do a quick search in your notes.
I’ve tried various systems over the years, and some have been better than others.
- Evernote, when it used to be good.
- Emacs Org Mode
- Confluence as a personal Wiki
- Different Notes apps
- Obsidian
Any of them works as long as they keep you jotting down ideas and engaging with your knowledge base.
I’ve learned that I value a few features more than others:
- The tool is easily accessible on all major operating systems, including mobile ones. - I’ve switched between MacOS, Windows, and Linux as well as Android and iOS over the years. Avoid tools that lock you in.
- You own the content and preferably the tool.
- Paid and open source with well-supported formats over subscriptions hosted in the cloud.
- Synchronizing the content is seamless.
These days, I live in Obsidian, with one tidy vault for long-term knowledge and another for my chaotic scribbles and meetings.
I kept fighting to find a structure that actually worked long term, so I restructured them with different paradigms over the years until I saw the style that works best for me.
Things I have successfully tried:
- Clear category hierarchy:
Development/Programming-Languages/Python/Debug.md - Project-oriented:
Projects/2025-04_Database-Migration - People-oriented:
Friends/Alice - Chronological:
Meeting-Notes/2025-04-12_Engineering-Allhands.md - Extensive linking to other notes – Think of Wikipedia
I’ve settled on a mix of the above with limited linking between notes.
My hierarchy naturally settled at two levels deep. I start making notes, and when there are multiple notes about a topic, I refactor the structure. I create a new folder with the topic name in my hierarchy and add it where it fits best. I’ll add more levels only for central topics with too many notes in one folder.
At the same time, I organize around people, categories, and projects. When I notice I keep hunting for the same note, I summarize the most essential information and optimize it for searchability. A friend shared a dozen great mentoring questions, which I saved under his name. After searching for his advice three times, scrolling through our conversations, I just made a coaching category so that I can find them faster.
Plant your knowledge base today. Feed it, prune it, let it grow into a system that works for you.