(2021-12-09) Le Cunff Redefining Knowledge Management With Kevin Lin Founder Of Dendron

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Redefining knowledge management with Kevin Lin, founder of Dendron. Welcome to this edition of our Tools for Thought series, where we interview founders on a mission to help us think better and become more creative and productive. Kevin Lin is the founder of Dendron, a lightning fast, open source personal knowledge management tool that lives in your integrated development environment (IDE).

Dendron uses schemas and templates to help you quickly capture and connect your ideas, so you can progressively build your personal knowledge base.

How is Dendron approaching personal knowledge management?

Most personal knowledge management (PKM) tools will readily help you create notes. They eventually hit a wall trying to retrieve them past a certain threshold.

Past this threshold, entropy wins and every query becomes a keyword search and scrolling through pages of results.

extending basic markdown with custom structural elements to make it easier to organize at scale and provides powerful tooling on top to work with this structure.

A parallel to this approach is found in software: programmers write code using programming languages that have structural elements built-in, such as inheritance and types. They use integrated development environments (IDEs) that provide tools to work with that structure

Our mission is to help humans take command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. Right now, we are presenting this in the form of an open-source, local-first, Markdown-based note-taking app that helps humans organize, reference, and work with any amount of knowledge.

Schemas are taxonomies that work over hierarchies. You can write a schema to describe a given hierarchy — projects, meetings, research topics — and attach templates to any node in the hierarchy.

it is well structured in form but highly flexible in definition.

We describe Dendron as taking a hierarchy-first approach to knowledge management. While we support other means of indexing such as tags, backlinks, block references, and search, the primary entry point for most queries ends up being hierarchy-driven. (Hierarchal Structure)

A graph is indeed more flexible. If we were building a digital brain for computers to perfectly model the world, we would probably go with this approach. But we’re not building a tool for computers to capture every facet of the world, we’re building a tool to help humans make sense of it.

The traditional failings of past hierarchies are that they were too rigid. Most people’s experience with hierarchies are folder hierarchies that ossify from the moment that they are created. These hierarchies are hard to change and so people don’t change them, even as their underlying understanding of the domain has changed.

Dendron has flexible hierarchies. They provide a structure for your notes but these structures can be easily changed. In programming, developers can refactor code and change its structure — the IDE will make sure that all references pointing to the original code are updated. In Dendron, you can refactor notes and hierarchies and Dendron will make sure that your PKM is consistent throughout

Our advice for new users is to start off with Dendron’s daily journal. (daily review)

Depending on the day, some notes might start getting very long. When that happens, you can split up those notes by creating scratch notes.

Scratch notes are like Zettel’s from Zettelkasten — they allow you to capture an independent thread of thought and link to other related thoughts at a later point in time.

You can refactor different sections of your daily journal notes into Zettel’s which in time, you might later refactor again into standalone hierarchies. (digital gardening)

This workflow of splitting notes as they get big is what folks in Dendron call the amoeba pattern and it is our recommended way of getting started. With the amoeba pattern, you don’t have to force everything into a hierarchy and are free to discover them as they occur

Every note in Dendron supports adding metadata in the note frontmatter, this is a part of the note separate from the markdown where users can add custom data. You can use this space to track your weight, habits, and anything else that might be of interest. This can be combined with another Dendron feature, pods, which let you transfer notes to and from Dendron. You can use pods to export just your daily journal notes to airtable and create a graph of your weight over time.

Dendron’s Git integration makes it easy to see changes to notes over time.

Fast retrieval means that even when you have over ten thousand notes, finding any particular note should take on the order of seconds. Normally, unless you know exactly where a note is, you’ll need to search for it and scan through multiple pages of results. In Dendron, because your notes are well structured, you can almost always look up the note you need by its hierarchy.

Finding notes by hierarchy is not the answer to all queries but it can be for most of them. For queries where it’s not, you can still use tags, backlinks, or raw text search to find what you’re looking for.

Dendron stores all files locally and is integrated inside your IDE (currently VSCode). This means you never have to make a switch – in fact, you can even make links from the code to Dendron and vice versa and get Dendron’s structural functionalities like backlinks to augment your code.

PKM isn’t one thing and I don’t think there will be one tool that does everything, or at least not well. Today, when I want to collaborate with someone, I will use google docs. When I work with tabular data, I like to use spreadsheets. Dendron is your single source of truth to organize and reference knowledge, pods help you make use of it even if the tool you’re using isn’t Dendron. Pods today support transferring data across many popular tools, and we’ll be introducing the capability for folks to write their own early 2022.

Finally, there’s publishing. Every Dendron workspace can also be published as a static website, hostable anywhere. Github pages and Netlify are common destinations.

For personal use, my entire life and essentially everything I know is stored in Dendron, currently at over 30,000 notes. I keep a bullet journal to track tasks and priorities in my daily journal. I have a separate hierarchy for every software project and service I have ever used and use it as a local version of stack overflow to solve issues I’ve already encountered I have a separate hierarchy for each hobby that I’m actively engaged in — such as cooking and salsa dancing — and keep a separate journal on my progress within each hierarchy.

I use Dendron to track every person I know, every book I’ve read, and every interaction I’ve had.

We use Dendron for task management, tracking issues (issue tracker) from our roadmap, and on Github. Every issue on GitHub is synced with our Dendron workspace and updated from there. When discussing features, we often use scratch notes in Dendron which we can then link back to the original tasks so that the full history, including discussion points, is preserved.