Ohh, Where Have You Been, Obsidian… Very rocky life over the last month and a half, and I was kinda in a funk due to my recent layoff. I wasn’t able to avoid the fade this round 😭 Fuggin’ AI…. But I’m looking at this as a new chapter in my life to force my hand in exploring new opportunities while also being able to spend more time on Digital Dopamine. That being said, I realized that a lot of the organizational tools I used stemmed from tools I used at work. Most of these tools, though, were paid for by the company, and outside of my workday, I didn’t really need any personal organizational tools outside of generic Apple apps. When time started to feel like it was slipping away from me and being wasted on procrastination, bad timing, or just flat-out forgetting. Made me realize how much I need clear direction and organization to be productive, so I decided to do some hunting for some new and free tools I can use for my personal station. I went through a lot of options, and none of them seemed to be as geared towards developers as Obsidian was. Plenty of single-use cases within the other software, but Obsidian takes the cake because of its maturity and plugin ecosystem. I was looking for an all-in-one solution, and with the right plugins, Obsidian fulfils all of my (current) needs. That being said, Joplin and LocArk were close runner-ups, and depending on what you’re looking for, those options may serve you better. There was another open source product called Memos, and it’s a self-hosted note-taking timeline. It resembles Bluesky or a Facebook feed, but it’s just quick, timestamped notes. The devs put it nicely: “A self-hosted timeline for quick notes, daily logs, links, and snippets. Open it, write in Markdown, and move on.” So I plan to use this in tandem with Obsidian. Leaning In Given the state of AI, I have no choice but to lean in. And I’m not talking about using it here or and there or using Cursor as my IDE from now on, but really REALLY lean in. I’m talking certs, deeper research into the history and academic papers, Databricks proctored exam, projects, etc. In this world of capitalism, we have to adapt or get left behind. Not because we aren’t still capable of good work, but because company shareholders have no ethics and require consistent profits year in and year out. So if you work for a public company, know that you most likely will need to adapt to using AI if it hasn’t already been shoved down your throat. This is one of the main reasons I started using Obsidian. I needed a new tool that I can use to keep myself organized and on pace to get done what I need to get done. Calendar events and notifications can only do so much, and I started to find that the tools that I usually used with work or even my personal projects all started to limit the features behind subscriptions, and became more of pay-to-use software than having a pretty generous free tier for individual devs. Notion was one of my go-to apps for dev notes and runbooks, and while the free tier is still pretty generous, the tool as a whole is so bulky with other things that can’t be used without a subscription, and AI is also something that isn’t too subtle in the app anymore. So the hunt began, what was free that had the same capabilities as Notion and didn’t force you to have a subscription to use FREE PLUGINS…..😒 (a bit salty) The thing is, what Notion offers for free can be obtained by other products that aren’t as cluttered with all of the premium features Notion has to offer. Through my search, time and time again, I saw Obsidian as the top contender IF not the winner, of the best software to use as a knowledge base and notes app for devs. I could not have been happier with my discovery. Whatcha Got, Obsidian? Now that we know how much I have geeked out over Obsidian, let’s actually take a peek at just a bit of what it has to offer. The sheer scope of the plugin library makes this software such an extensible tool, and there’s no way I can (over ever will lol) cover all of them. We will cover some of the more important plugins, though the main focus is on Obsidian and what the tool includes by default. The Vault You Didn’t Know You Needed To me, the feature that stands out the most, since Notion was lacking it, is the vault concept (seems more common than not these days). Everything lives in a folder on your machine. Plain .md files. That’s it. No proprietary format, no data stored on AWS or Google Cloud servers. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, you’d still have all your notes, fully readable in any text editor or app that reads markdown files. That peace of mind alone is worth switching, and on top of that, this makes Obsidian the perfect tool for introducing AI agents into your knowledge base and note-taking process. You can have multiple vaults too — so if you want a clean separation between, say, your job search grind and your personal dev projects, that’s a two-second setup. Keeping It in Sync One question I immediately had after setting up my vault was, “Okay, how would I be able to sync up Obsidian with the mobile app without using Obsidian’s paid sync option?” Since we’re on Apple hardware, the answer was shockingly simple — iCloud Drive. In Obsidian on your Mac, when you create your vault, navigate to your iCloud Drive folder as the save location. Obsidian will create its own folder there automatically. Then, on your iPhone, download the free Obsidian app from the App Store, tap Create new vault, and toggle Store in iCloud on. From there, open the vault switcher, and your vault shows up ready to go. One thing to note — make sure your vault lives inside the Obsidian folder that the app creates in iCloud Drive, not a manually created folder. iCloud needs that app-generated folder to handle sync correctly. You can verify this in the Files app under Browse → iCloud Drive → Obsidian. Setup Docs → https://obsidian.md/help/sync-notes Markdown First, Always Everything in Obsidian is Markdown. If you’re a developer and you don’t already write in Markdown, you’re gonna learn to love it real fast. Headers, code blocks, callouts, tables, and checkboxes — it all renders beautifully in preview mode. And because it’s just .md files under the hood, your notes are version-control-friendly. Throw that vault in a Git repo, and now you’ve got note history. You’re welcome. # 1. cd into the vault folder cd /users/{my_username}/Documents/Obsdian # 2. git init git add -A git commit -m “Initial Commit” # 3 gh repo create project-name --public --source=. --remote=origin --push ⚠️ Heads up — that command above uses the GitHub CLI (gh). If you haven’t installed it yet, the push step will fail. You can grab it with Homebrew: brew install gh gh auth login Run gh auth login once follow the prompts, you’re good to go from that point on. Backlinks & Internal Linking — This Is Where It Gets Good This is the feature that will most likely be the catalyst for how my notes and doc creation evolve. In Obsidian, you can link any note to any other note using double brackets — [[like this]]. That seems simple enough, but the magic is the backlinks panel. Every note shows you a list of every other note that links to it, automatically. No manual cross-referencing. You start building a web of connected knowledge without a need for heavy configuration or reliance on plugins. The Graph View Okay, I’ll be honest — the graph view is 30% useful and 70% just deeply satisfying to look at. It renders a visual map of all your notes and how they connect to each other. As your vault grows, this thing becomes this sprawling network of nodes, and it genuinely feels like you’re looking at your own brain. Useful for spotting orphaned notes (stuff you wrote and never connected to anything) and identifying your knowledge clusters. Canvas Canvas is Obsidian’s infinite whiteboard feature, and it’s built right in. You can drag notes, images, cards, and web links onto a free-form board and arrange them however your brain needs them arranged. I’ve been using it for mapping out my AI learning path — laying out topics, drawing connections between concepts, dropping in reference notes. Think Miro or FigJam, but local-first and totally free. Daily Notes There’s a core plugin called Daily Notes (more on core plugins later) that creates a new dated note every day with a template you define. This is where my Obsidian and Memos workflow starts to come together — Memos handles my quick, throwaway timestamped thoughts throughout the day, and Daily Notes is where I do my actual structured reflection, task tracking, and progress logging. Two different tools, two different use cases, zero overlap. Templates Speaking of templates — Obsidian has a built-in templating system that lets you define reusable note structures. Spin up a new note and insert a template with a hotkey. I plan on creating more templates to become more efficient and consistent with my content depth and length. Hopefully should help me save a hell of a lot of time. Command Palette & Hotkeys The command palette (Cmd/Ctrl + P) gives you a searchable list of every action in the app. It’s that VS Code energy developers are already wired to love. Almost everything in Obsidian has a bindable hotkey too, so once you get your muscle memory dialed in, you barely have to touch the mouse. Very common feature. Themes & Appearance Out of the box, Obsidian has a solid dark and light mode. But the community theme library goes deep — there are themes that make this thing look like a hacker terminal, a Notion clone, a notebook app, whatever vibe you’re going for. Fully customizable via CSS snippets, too, if you want to get nerdy with it. $FREE.99 And all of that? Zero dollars. No subscription tier required. That’s the baseline, and it already clears the bar for most of what I was using Notion for. Now
