How and why I started managing a Digital Garden?

I started consistently collecting ideas and resources, probably from high-school on. I got my first laptop in 2013, so I migrated some pictures/files of mine from our old family PC. Then I started to collect files for Uni in 2013 Szeged. Over the years, I collected shit tons of files, as well as media unrelated to Uni. It slowly grew to a HUGE ass directory containing more than 300 GB of data. Most of them were trash I'd never use again (lot of space was taken by satellite images for Uni).

In 2016-2017 I started to get behind with Uni, work, home and related tasks during Uni, partially because some of my bad habits. I felt I was doing very bad in all areas of life, and was procrastinating without end. But I knew I had things to do, so I'd just write them down on TODO lists. I consider these the first trials of having some kind of system for tracking my duties. I'd just dump my thoughts, so I'd not forget them.

In 2017, I went to 2017 Karlsruhe for a semester, and I had a LOT of administration tasks, not even mentioning tasks related to courses. I was overwhelmed, and started taking more and more notes. I even started organizing those thoughts/notes. But this was really the beginning. Most of these notes had deadlines, none of them were evergreen.

After coming home, I started my (eventually huge) M.Sc. thesis project, which would take more than 12 months of moderate effort. My note-taking and goal-setting skills level-upped during this period. Some of my notes survived from this period, most did not.

When I started working at Gerhardt Informatics in 2018 I learned new ways of taking notes and organizing my thoughts. And started using this knowledge at the end of 2019 in Stuttgart. I was producing a lot of written material during my time in Stuttgart. Lot of notes were taken in iNotes. It made sense, but those notes were never read, only written. I did not know this is a problem.

During this time I set tons of goals and also started using OKRs for personal matters. I also started reading about self-awareness. All of this made me better understand my life, which in turn made me write more and better notes.

This was the time I created wiki.me. A directory for all my notes and useful resources. I used markdown as the default file format. And it worked surprisingly well. I would use it from VSCode and open it multiple times a week dumping my thoughts, TODOs, things I learned in different files. I did all my quarterly, yearly goal setting and all retros in this workspace. It became extremely valuable to me.

At that time I had no idea, that there are systems and practices already established and shared by people on the internet.
Then I stumbled upon Personal knowledge management and Thiago Forte's Second Brain.

I quickly found Obsidian and started using it (instead of VSCode). Since then, See notes in My Second Brain has skyrocketed. But no notes were ever published.

Recently I learned about Digital Gardens, and I started to publish my notes to Garden of Bits. But that's another story.