Recent reading has included “Pragmatic Thinking and Learning” by Andy Hunt, from @progprog. Most interestingly, it covers almost exclusively topics that I have absorbed over the last 30 years or so – meditation, context switching, personality types, left/right brain thinking, mind maps, GTD, and so on. I didn’t realise that I knew so much! I can’t check the history easily (Amazon and Wikipedia don’t show copyright dates), but I found mind maps in the early 70s. The other most interesting fact is that the terminology Andy uses is almost entirely different from that I learned (apart from Mind Maps). So I had experienced zazen, some different personality type systems, Time Manager, and some others.
One of the ideas I had come across independently was the use of a personal wiki – I was using TiddlyWiki a few years ago (2006), mainly as a book reviewing tool, then gradually stopped using it. So this was my trigger to check if it still existed, and where it had gone to in the intervening years.
The good news is that TiddyWiki still exists, and seems to have gone from strength to strength. Back then, it was an implementation of a classic Wiki, all in html and Javascript in a single file. The current version has adopted an ingenious plug-in structure with its own ecosystem. There is also a GTD based modified TiddlyWiki, d3. Incidentally, I used to use Jayson Adams Notebook on NeXT, which approaches very close to being an older implementation of a visual/clippings based wiki – and seems to have reappeared on MacOS X in recent years, and I just discovered that there’s an iPad version.
To get an idea of TiddlyWiki’s current state, take a look at the multi-user forum in 15 minutes video.
The book is on the Pragmatic Programmer’s site at http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning .
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