I’m aiming for consistency in the way I write my notes. Their format is as follows:

• Each note has a title. The title might describe a concept (such as the structure of a note), make a claim (such as Short-lived branches are indispensable for refactoring), or describe a process (such as Drive change by writing structured proposal documents).

• Each note has content. The structure of the content of a note is free-form. I use Markdown, even though Lightweight markup languages are inadequate for technical writing, because that is what Bear, my note-taking app, uses.

• Each note has a revision date, but not a publication date. Notes are intended to be ever-green and thus continuously updated, and an original publication date would therefore not be relevant. The revision date is relevant for readers, even if just to confirm that the content is indeed up to date.

References are handled inline — see My web site: citation system.

Notes have a confidence level (low-medium-high). Low-confidence notes are excluded from search indexes (Google and the like). Inspired by Gwern’s confidence tags.

The list of notes is sorted by title, because Short-form content doesn’t need to be written as a chronological sequence of blog posts.

I write my notes in Bear. I’m Importing notes from Bear into Nanoc.