Other

When I started taking these notes, I had a few goals in mind. I wanted them to be:

• Portable & Shareable -- Being able to share the notes in multiple formats is very convenient. With various formats, the content becomes more easily shareable.
• Not absurdly detailed -- I wanted my notes to simply reflect how I understood certain concepts. The details of each concept were not necessary for me to include in the notes, rather I wanted to record how I understood a concept.
• Easy to write -- I wanted to spend minimal time when it came to actually transcribing the notes. I would use LaTeX, however, this often comes with the cost of spending time with its syntax. I wanted a format that was easy to write, but also supported the various types of contents I would come across, such as equations, code, graphs, and pictures.
• Searchable -- When finals came around or when it was time to do some homework, it would be extremely convenient if I could just search for a keyword or concept across the notes I took and find out where certain topics fit in and were discussed.

To accomplish these goals, I first chose the format of my notes: R Markdown. Since it was Markdown, it was very easy to write. However, it was also very powerful, as you could have embedded R code to manipulate the content of the document dynamically. It also converted between various formats which was very nice.

It was also very convenient to have the format as a plain text file. With Word documents and others, the file is typically a binary or archive file. It requires you to have a program that can understand the file format and provide you with an environment to edit and read the content. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) can be nice, but often you will have to navigate specific menus in a specific program to get what you want. With plain text, you can use any text editor to edit the file. Different text editors have different features and advantages, so it is convenient to have a format such that you can use any text editor. And with plain text, it makes it much easier to search, which was one of my goals. I used ripgrep which is some wizardly piece of software that could search through large directories very quickly for text. If I were using a WYSIWYG editor, this would not have been the case.

Source for the notes and build instructions for the site can be found here