🧠 How I Use Obsidian as a Digital Scrapbook
Exploring how I use Obsidian to collect ideas, connect thoughts, and build my personal knowledge base as a DevOps professional.
I’ve used a lot of note-taking apps over the years, but none has felt quite as natural — or as powerful — as Obsidian.
I treat it less like a notebook and more like a digital scrapbook: a space where I can freely capture, connect, and evolve ideas across time.
✨ Why Obsidian?
Here’s why it clicked for me:
- Markdown-based: Plain text, portable, and future-proof.
- Local-first: No forced cloud lock-in. Files live in my own folders.
- Linking: [[Like this]] — bidirectional links make it effortless to connect thoughts.
- Backlinking & Graph View: Visualize how ideas cluster over time.
- Plugin Ecosystem: Community-powered tools for daily notes, tasks, spaced repetition, etc.
🧰 How I Use It as a DevOps Engineer
1. 🧪 Capture Everything
- Ideas from articles, books, podcasts
- Snippets of terminal commands or scripts
- Architecture patterns I like
- Interesting error messages (and their fixes)
Anything with a spark of curiosity gets clipped or jotted into Obsidian.
2. 🧵 Connect the Dots
Instead of rigid folders, I use tags and links to surface patterns across projects:
#aws,#terraform,#security,#ai,#noteworthy- Related notes link together like a web of thought
3. 📆 Journal + Daily Notes
I use the Daily Notes plugin to:
- Track progress across days
- Quickly review yesterday’s priorities
- Drop “half-thoughts” and revisit them later
4. 🎨 As a Scrapbook
It’s not always neat. And that’s the point.
Some notes are polished; others are raw sketches of ideas or pasted screenshots. Obsidian lets me explore without pressure.
🧠 Why It Works for Me
Obsidian respects how humans think, not just how we organize files.
It gives me:
- A single searchable brain dump
- The ability to grow ideas organically
- A calm, local-first environment that’s fast and distraction-free
🔗 Final Thoughts
If you’re someone who learns best by making connections, and wants full control of your notes — give Obsidian a shot. It’s more than a note app — it’s a thinking tool.
Dave