Setting the stage I am leading a project to review my company’s business strategy. I want to identify projects for next year’s business plan and to create a strong link between the strategy and our projects. This will help in storytelling with the people delivering these projects and to the executives governing the strategy. This exercise has put the gap between information and knowledge management tools I use in private and available at work in the spotlight. There are four capabilities I miss most at work: backlinks, block references, tags, and a query language to work with the information.

Over the past few weeks I have spent many hours thinking about my personal information security requirements and discussing pros and cons with others. My goal with this article is to clarify few concepts that have surfaced in these discussions. I want to help you find your way in the jungle of information security.

It has been roughly a year since I first came across Obsidian. After careful consideration trying out Tiddly Wiki, Obsidian, Roam and TheBrain, I opted for Roam. I chose Roam because of its friction-free, browser-based user interface, its product vision and the vibrant community which I was sure will drive significant innovation - and it has! After one year, I was curious to see how Obsidian has evolved. This post will walk you through my second first-impressions comparing Obsidian to Roam.

SEX IS GOOD. But as with all things, sex also has its "dark side". If you are not careful, you can get hurt. ROAM IS GOOD. I am a firm believer in Roam's vision. But as with all things... This article is about information security. While I will focus my discussion on roamresearch.com , my points are broadly relevant in today's online/digital world.

  I am releasing the MVP version of the Roam-Excalidraw Plugin. Over the past two weeks, I have been super focused on getting to this point. As a consequence, this post is going to be shorter and more utilitarian than usual. I had to make a choice whether to release the plugin this weekend or to write a detailed blog post. I opted for the first.

Conor ( @Conaw ) pointed me to Excalidraw last week, and I was blown away by the tool and especially about the opportunities it opens up for  Roam Research ! It is a full-featured, embeddable sketching component ready for web integration. This post will showcase key Excalidraw features and discusses some of the issues I still need to solve to complete its integration into Roam. I spent most of my free time during the week integrating Excalidraw into Roam. This article will introduce Excalidraw by showcasing its features.

Roam is like a good swiss army knife, it even has a ClojureScript development environment. I spent the past 14 days getting acquainted with {{roam/render}} . This post serves as a note-to-self, to summarize and organize what I have learned.  This post is targeted at developers and Roam hackers. If you are not in one of these camps, you will likely struggle with the content.

Taking notes is very simple. You take a piece of paper and jot down a few thoughts. That's it. But if it is this simple, why all the fuss? What makes quality note-taking so difficult?

This post is about my note-taking journey. I cover two applications in detail, TheBrain , and Roam Research . I compare the strengths and weaknesses of these with each other and with my own note-taking needs.

This post summarizes my learnings from the Roam Agile project. I present the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) version of the Agile Development Template. Here you will find the link to the Roam EDN archive containing the template, instructions for how you can get started, YouTube videos showcasing the solution, and a link to the graph I used for my project with my backlog, user stories, sprints, daily standups, customer feedback, etc.

I spent the last week working on a Roam template for Agile Product Management. My goal is to create a step by step how-to guide and a full-featured template database, that a product development team can pick up to kick-start their process using Roam. I assume that Roam will be the only task and user story management tool used by this team, and I am developing a fully self-sustained solution built 100% around Roam's capabilities.

You are keeping your notes tidy to help your future self find relevant information. Note-taking systems offer many ways to organize information. One common feature of these is how easily they get out of hand.

In this post, I am going to walk you through how I take notes in one-on-one meetings. My approach is not rocket science, it is almost embarrassingly simple;

This is an evergreen note that I will be revisit regularly to develop a comprehensive list of note-taking approaches including their practical implementations in various software tools. This post will serve as an elaborate table of contents, including a brief introductory discussion on the importance of note-taking, followed by a high-level walkthrough of each method. Links to posts and videos with detailed examples and descriptions will follow over the coming weeks and months.

This is a quick walkthrough of two powerful approaches you can take to debug your JavaScript code in your Smart Blocks in Roam.

Why is it that even your most honest and committed attempts to change, often lead back to the status quo? Why are outcomes so frequently pale compared to the vivid color of the aspiration? How can you avert the grip of your immunity to change? Imagine what would be possible if, for a change, you could live up to your New Year's Resolutions?

I have perfected the process of importing ePub books into Roam. I was able to create an almost frictionless experience for reading a book in Roam. Put aside the issue with reading on a tablet screen instead of a kindle, this solution is much more comfortable and efficient for reading and note taking at the same time then the Kindle. I have also develop a solution to automatically maintain full traceability from my notes to the source text even though the ePub book sits in a different Roam graph compared to my literature notes. This post is a detailed how-to guide for setting yourself up to read books in Roam. Here is the link to the Python program you need for converting your ePub books: Colab Notebook Here is the link to the Book-base.json that will be required to achieve the full experience. This is how the end result looks Detailed how-to walkthrough This second video explains the full process from the beginning to the end in 27 minu...

In this post I will present my final solution for getting the Bible imported into Roam Research . I have finally found a way to drastically decrease the size of the imported Roam graph, but still have a reasonable solution for accessing multiple translations and cross references. I will share my thoughts on performance and potential next steps for making the Bible work even better in Roam. If you are interested in the topic, I have two other posts on the subject. Links are at the end. You can download the Roam .EDN archive for the Bible from here: ASV.edn For a real time demonstration of the full import process within 3 minutes check out this video . WARNING: by restoring the ASV.edn into your graph, all other data in your graph will be lost! The source code for the converter is here:  Roam.json Bible importer with BUTTON for verse numbers v1.ipynb Use this if the primary translation you'd like to use in Roam is ...

I don't give up easy. After some mixed results the first time around (see my previous post:  My Adventres with Roam.JSON ) I have now successfully created a full featured Study Bible in Roam by importing the Bible and cross references. I have also created an ePub importer and loaded War and Peace into Roam as a pilot. This may be helpful to those of you who want to integrate your reading experience fully into Roam. This post will be a mix of technical details and a demonstration of the Study Bible I have created. I'll start with the introduction of the end result - you can bail out after that if you are not interested in the gory details. I decided to publish this post even though I am still not 100% satisfied with my solution. I have lots of further ideas to explore, which I will share in Part 3 on Roam JSON. There are still many open questions and I have lots of additional ideas to explore. I'll provide a list of some of these at the end.  My P...

This post is a bit more technical in nature, though I think the first half may be interesting even to those who are not into Python and the inner workings of Roam data import. What is Roam? Roam is a bit like a personal Wiki. It is a note-taking application that supports networked thought. At its core, Roam is extremely simple to understand. A Roam database simply consists of pages and paragraphs. The paragraphs are displayed as bullet point lists which can be nested much like in an outliner. In Roam lingo paragraphs are called "blocks" When writing, you can simply reference other pages using double square brackets. For example to reference my page in Roam for Zsolt's Blog I just write [[Zsolt's Blog]]. Now if I click on the reference between the brackets, Roam will take me to the other page. What makes Roam unique is how you can reference not only pages, but also blocks by entering the block's unique identifier in ((round bracket...