Obsidian

Obsidian is the note-taking app I use for most of my writing. It is focused on smooth editing of local Markdown files and it has an amazing plugin ecosystem.

With this app there is no proprietary dataformat, no vendor lock-in, no cloud dependency. You don't need to sign up or share your data anywhere. Your notes are just files on your disk, readable and editable with any text editor, now and in ten years.

The philosophy behind Obsidian is a reflection of how its CEO Steph Ango thinks about software. On a sidenote, I really enjoy Steph Ango's blog and writing and he is one of the reasons I decided to start this blog.

Besides agreeing with the philosophy, I also really like that there are endless ways to structure your notes: tags, links, frontmatter, folders, and many more via plugins.

What is unique to Obsidian is the ability to link notes to each other, which enables you to build a personal knowledge graph from your notes.

A nice feature of Obsidian is the graph view, which visualizes exactly that knowledge graph. On top of that, you can create a simulation of how this graph evolved over time — I've created a video of this below.

The graph view simulation over time of my private Obsidian vault.

Age of AI

I've started using AI-agents and integrating them wherever I'm working on my computer. Agents that I already use a lot are Claude Code, Github Copilot, and ChatGPT Codex. At the moment I don't run these AI models locally on my own hardware and I don't trust the companies that provide the models with all my private data. So, I am not yet feeding all my personal notes into these AI systems, because of privacy concerns. However, I do really see the power of being able to 'chat' with my own notes as context or leveraging AI tools for easier writing. That is why I think it is very important to write in a format that is easily understandable for both humans and AI systems; Markdown is that format.

Owning your data in the age of AI

In my opinion, owning your own data nowadays is really important for multiple reasons, but I'll mention two here. First of all, if you don't keep your data private then someone will take it and use it to train their AI models. But what is probably the more important reason for me personally, is that if someone else owns my data, then I can't leverage it properly myself.

I'll describe this last point based on my previous note-taking app: OneNote. All my notes were 'locked' into this platform and it was not trivial to get them out. With some effort I did find a method, and exported everything and imported everything into my Obsidian Vault, but that's is besides the point I'm trying to make. While my notes were in OneNote I was confined to the feature available in the platform. And OneNote did not allow me to use my own scrips or AI-tools to work with my notes. Now with Obsidian I don't have this problem anymore and I get all the freedom I want.