My talk at the PKM Summit: Doing It in Public

On March 22nd and 23rd, I went to the PKM Summit, a conference held in Utrecht, the Netherlands. I had never been to an in-person conference just for Personal Knowledge Management and note-taking, and it was amazing.

I did two talks at PKM Summit. In the first one, my friend Zsolt VIczián (whom I met for the first time there and who is the developer of the Obsidian Excalidraw and ExcaliBrain plugins) talked about how to use Excalidraw for playing TTRPGs (TableTop Roleplaying Games). This talk was recorded, though I don't have the recording yet. I'll definitely share it when I do!

The second talk is the one I've rehashed here, because it was not recorded and I still wanted to share it. It's called Doing It in Public: Observability for PKM, and it relates my day job (as a software performance engineer) to note-taking and PKM systems.

PKM Summit notes

When you gather a bunch of note-taking nerds in one place, there will be notes. It was surreal to attend a talk and see almost everyone take notes in some way. I saw physical notebooks, mobile devices, tablets, laptops, e-ink tablets, and more software apps than I'd ever heard of.

Here's a link to my notes on some of the talks from the conference. I've been trying out hybrid approaches to note-taking recently, and took all my conference notes on my new Boox Air 3C e-ink tablet. Those notes are available on PDF in the vault linked above, but their primarily visual nature (and the presence of Zsolt) inspired me to use Excalidraw. I have more videos planned around this, but here's a sneak peek for you lovely folk. This is an Excalidraw drawing within Obsidian that maps out my experience at the PKM Summit:

Zsolt and I also recorded a long chat discussing visual PKM and the conference in general. I plan to release it in full to Patreon in the next few days, so stay tuned for that!

Have a lovely weekend!