rewritten on 31st august, 2026.
philosophy:
itp academically mandates each student to maintain a blog.
in the three years that i worked before itp, i maintained a closed zettlekasten or ‘digital-brain’. the idea was to not let information blow by, and to process what i absorb via writing.
the chance to make an itp-blog was to do what i did before, but better.
in my first year, i also realized the importance of writing (and sharing) in public. i would have random conversations with people, just because they read a thought that i posted on this blog; or see someone figure out an electronic-component by going through my experiments-log.
system:
the blog is written in a rhizomatic fashion 1 — meaning that everything is a note. conversations, thoughts, reading-notes, lectures, observations, et-cetera; are all stored, as much as possible; with equal weightage.
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the only structure that i am forced to include is that notes from each course are stored in their specific folders. these are typically lecture-notes and a log of weekly-experiments done for the course. everything else is out in the open.
since everything can be a note, the constraint to write long pieces of text is removed. therefore, many shorter notes can often be interconnected with one-another, and new (synthesized) notes are born as a result. for example, a conversation with someone provides new insight into a thought i formally had, and then that new thought is written down as a separate note.
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notes are still categorized, so that they are searchable by buckets, via tags. for example, search for writings.
often, a bunch of these interconnected notes will lead to something that i can present externally — talks, projects, pieces of writing — and that will be documented formally on my website.
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navigation:
The garden is the web as topology. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships.
perhaps the best way is to wander, and to tell me about the new paths that you discovered.
however, in general, navigation on the desktop looks like so:
similar on the phone, but with these differences:
acknowledgements:
kezia & matt for generously sharing their time to help me debug; jacky for making quartz; felixnie for helping people with custom-sort; andre, lucia & jasmine for sharing their blogs; itp for requiring a blog; shobhan for introducing me to discipline; and sakina for bearing my unhealthy obsession with getting this right.