Most of what I learn at work ends up scattered: a decision explained in a Slack thread, an incident fix in a terminal history, a good PR review comment that disappears once the branch merges. A few months later I need it and can't find it.
So I put together a plain Obsidian vault that gives each of those a place, and lets Dataview pull them back together. I'm selling it as Dev Second Brain, and this post is a walk through what's in it.
What's inside
Six templates (Templater):
- Daily note: a quick log of what you worked on and what's still open
- Project
- Decision record (ADR): auto-numbered, so you don't have to track the next ID
- Incident: what broke and how you fixed it
- PR review
- Weekly review
Four dashboards (Dataview):
- Home: today, open loops, open incidents, recent decisions, active projects
- Decisions
- Incidents
- Weekly rollup
The dashboards are only useful once there's something in them, so the vault ships with a few clearly marked example notes. It isn't empty on day one, and you can delete the examples whenever you like.
What you need
- Obsidian (free)
- Two free community plugins: Templater and Dataview
The README has a five-minute setup guide, including installing those plugins and switching on the one Templater setting you need per device. I tested it in Obsidian 1.13.7 with Templater 2.25.1 and Dataview 0.5.68.
How I use it
The habit is small: write the daily note, and when something worth keeping happens (a decision, an incident, a review you'd want to find again), make a note from the matching template. The dashboards do the gathering. At the end of the week the weekly review and rollup show what actually happened, without me reconstructing it from memory.
If you'd rather build your own, the earlier posts in this series cover the Dataview queries and linking decision records to git commits that this vault is built around.
Get it
Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, personal-use license: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd
My other templates are at https://forge.engelailabs.com.
