WEBVTT
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My name is Greg Coladonato,
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and this is my presentation named
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One Effective Computer Science
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Grad Student Workflow.
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For self-introduction,
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I've been an Emacs user since 1989
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when I was an undergrad in computer science,
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and I'm still an Emacs user
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now I'm getting a master's of science
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in computer science.
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In my day job,
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I work in product management
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in a Silicon Valley
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computer vision startup,
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and I'm proud to say
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I've been submitting my first PRs
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to open source projects this year.
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The goals of my workflow are first
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to make my notes easily accessible
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and searchable.
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Second goal, provide a way for me
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to permanently remember what I learned,
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and thirdly, to enable conceptual linking
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between related topics and entities.
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I'll give examples of each of these
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as we go along.
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The requirements of my workflow:
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it needs to be tightly integrated with PDFs,
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as most of the documents I get from grad school
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are in PDF form,
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most of my submissions of work
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are in PDF form,
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and most research papers I have access to
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are in PDF form as well.
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I want my workflow to be subscription-free.
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I do not want to be locked into
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paying a subscription
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just to read my own notes.
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It must be future proof.
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I have used note-taking systems in the past
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that I now no longer have a way to decode,
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so they're locked into some format
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that I can no longer use.
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I want my notes to be version-controlled,
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so that if I make a big mistake,
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I can undo and revert
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to a prior good version,
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and I want my system to use spaced repetition,
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which is an advanced method
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of learning things over time
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so that you don't forget them.
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The package dependencies, in brief.
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org-mode, org-roam, org-roam-bibtex,
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pdf-tools, org-noter and org-ref.
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And now let's get on to some demos.
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Here in my browser window here
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is a lecture in the course
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I'm currently taking on deep learning.
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It's very nice that the professor
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provides slides. So this is
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the 54-page PDF file of the slides
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for the lecture. The problem is,
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it's hard to take notes on them.
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It's impossible to take notes on them
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here in this browser,
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as far as I know. So what I've done is
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I've incorporated these slides as a PDF
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in org-roam, which...
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I will now visit this file
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and you can bring it up alongside the PDF
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I was just looking at here.
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So what i like about this system is,
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as I'm going through and reading
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watching the video of the lecture,
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I'm following along in the PDF notes here,
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and I'm taking my notes alongside them.
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So here's the first part of that lecture.
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You can't see at the bottom right now,
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but this is one of the earlier pages.
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I go to the second section here
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and you see that my notes
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for this part of the lecture,
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here, my notes here...
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I love how the notes
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for different parts of the lecture
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are coordinated with the different parts
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of the PDF that go along with the lecture.
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Now let's go back to the top of this
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and you'll see... First, you'll see my notes
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down here. I'll go into these
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a little bit more shortly,
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but one of the things
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that goes along with a lecture
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in a grad school class is these days
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in computer science citations
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for research papers
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that were expected to read.
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So here's one entitled MixMatch.
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I haven't downloaded this paper yet,
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so let's go. Take a look at that.
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So I use a keystroke to select
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the title of the paper
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and another keybinding
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to search for that paper
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on a website called arXiv.
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arXiv, if you're not familiar--
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and here's a match--
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arXiv, if you're not familiar,
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is an open research server
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where researchers publish papers
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before they're published in journals
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or conferences, and they are copyright-free
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and open to anyone to read.
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So here is the paper I was looking for.
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I copy this link into an Org mode link,
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and I come back to Emacs,
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and now another keystroke
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will revisit that website,
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pull down the PDF, and pull down
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all the information in the bibliography
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and put it into a bibliography here,
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inside my local bibliography.
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So here's the paper I was just looking at.
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Another great thing about a lot of PDFs
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is that they have an embedded outline
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that you can extract via the pdf-tools package.
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So now you see on the right here:
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introduction, related work, MixMatch,
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experiments. I can go right to that section,
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and this outline knows exactly
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which part of the PDF
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corresponds to each of the parts
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of this outline in the paper.
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So then, when I go take notes in here,
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just like in my other notes,
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it'll be coordinated with the PDF
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that goes along with it.
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So let's quit out of here.
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So now that I've captured that...
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Uh oh, this is the same paper.
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So now here I am back in my notes.
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now that I've captured this paper.
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What I'm going to do is make it a link,
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so the org-roam node that I just took
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will be here at the top. MixMatch.
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There's a little difference.
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You'll see here, this m is a different case
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than this m, and that's one of my to-do list.
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I'd like to make it so that this search
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is a little less case-sensitive.
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So now I've linked this link to this paper
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into these notes, and now these are...
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you'll see a little bit later
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how these links can be graphed and followed
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and so forth. While I'm in this document,
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I'd like to show you
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that when I'm learning something
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and I learn a new fact,
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I write down what I learned
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in the form of a question and an answer.
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So you can see here, there's a question
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that begins with who, what, where.
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It begins with a w word, or how,
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or if or is, and it ends in a question mark,
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and then following that is another string
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that ends in a period.
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So I have a... I'd like to do this
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in Emacs as well, but I haven't
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worked that out yet.
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I have a script that will...
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Let's find a-n-k-i-f.
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Okay, I have a script that will go through
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all the notes in my org-roam directory
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and find all the questions.
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Now let's pull up the most...
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No, don't edit the buffer.
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Save that. Come back to here.
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So now you can see that all the questions
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that I've written in my notes
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have now been ANKIFIED.
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Now what's that mean?
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Anki is this program here
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which is a flashcard system
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based on the idea...
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No, let's not download that right now.
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This is a system that enables
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the easy creation of flash cards
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that show you the front,
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show you the back,
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and then you decide
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if you knew that question or not.
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So I don't want to spend much time on this,
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but everything I'm learning in a class,
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I write into my notes as a question
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that I load into this flashcard system
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that then I can review on a walk,
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or on a bus ride, or whatever,
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and stay on top of indefinitely.
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As long as I can continue
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to keep reviewing that,
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I will keep that information
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fresh in my mind.
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So now let's come out of these files
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back to here.
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So I've demoed class note PDFs,
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grabbing papers from arXiv,
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autogenerating the skeletons
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and the flashcards,
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and now let's see what it looks like.
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Let's visualize the connections
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between these nodes.
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So here is a graph for the file
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I'm reading right now:
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One Effective Grad Student Workflow.
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Here is the node I have a link to
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in my Org mode document
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on spaced repetition. We can open that
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and come right back to Emacs,
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and I just love that.
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For the more complicated topics,
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you can see connections between things
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that you maybe didn't realize you had,
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and some of the notes you've taken.
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And so I'm getting near the end.
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I just want to show some small customizations.
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I save my org mode files
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that are in org-roam
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with a year year month month date prefix,
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so that I can tell when the node was created
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I also truncate them at 30 characters,
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so that when I do an ls,
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they don't word wrap.
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Maybe that's OCD.
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I also use an ID format that is year month
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day hour month hour minute second
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rather than the full UUID format
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because that number up there,
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that ID makes sense to me
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and it gives me an idea of when that node--
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which you can, by the way,
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you can have--even one of these subheadings
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can be a node in org-roam.
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So now that you can see
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that was created right now.
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Some of the TODOs I still have
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in this system... We don't have to go
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too much into them, but I mentioned
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case insensitivity, and I'd like
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to make some improvements to org-noter.
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At this point, I'd just like to...
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I have a list of people I'd like to thank.
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I'm not gonna read the whole list out,
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but they're a bunch of software engineers
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that created great free software
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that's very useful to me
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and I use every day, so thank you to them,
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and thank you all for listening to my talk.
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[captions by sachac]
