Welcome to my digital garden.
I’m Akash Bagchi. A 25 year old full-stack developer currently doing my Masters in Computer Science at Arizona State University, Tempe AZ, USA. You’re currently seeing what I would sometimes refer to as a blog, sometimes as a wiki, and mostly as my digital garden. Although this garden is not structured for the purposes of a random viewer’s browsing, I encourage anyone interested to start with the links below. More ‘hidden’ nodes can always be discovered via the file explorer to the left of your screen, or by following note links/backlinks or even the graph view.
Get Started:
Why?
I’ve been a huge proponent of organized note-taking for the longest time, although I admit it’s more because I’m an aesthete, than because I’m organized.
I’ve jumped between dozens of different note-taking and agenda applications - from Notion to Todoist, physical journals and more; but nothing has ever really stuck because I’ve always foolishly tried to restrict it in scope - sometimes as a diary or journal, sometimes a to-do list, a budget, or maybe a poetry book.
This time though, I feel I’ve finally found a system that works for me, and that is to abandon attempt at labeling what this is or should be, and focusing solely on networked thinking. What does that mean? That brings us to the next section
The Objective
As I mentioned before, I personally attribute the failure of my past attempts at journaling and comprehensive note-taking to the fact that I would try to limit the scope of what got recorded to an objective that was narrow in scope.
This time around, my objective is to simply grow and expand this digital garden with all the ideas, philosophies, learnings, and reflections that bubble up in my brain. There’s no narrow restrictions in scope, because there is no scope. No definite format, grammar rules, timelines or targets, and therefore anything goes.
I want to discover what sort of emergent ideas, cross-topic relationships, and expanded knowledge can be discovered from doing this. Since it’s published online, of course it can function as my personal “blog”, but more than that, I want to build it over time into a ‘second-brain’, somewhere I can look up information from a random project I undertook, I a book I read, or a useful tool I found on the internet and documented.