Dendron Weekly: 0.89 release, Contributors Guide, new Blog post, and more!
It’s time for a weekly roundup! The email newsletter is a curated collection of weekly updates about Dendron and the Dendron community!
A New Dendron Release has Appeared!
Dendron 0.89 has sprouted 🌱
Contributors: Interested in contributing to the development of Dendron? We’ve added a CONTRIBUTING.md file so that you can find out how to get started shaping the future of Dendron!
- More information in the Contributing Guide
Highlights
- enhance: create CONTRIBUTING.md file
Everything Else
- feat(workspace): detect and fill missing default configs on extension upgrade
- fix(workspace): typo in dendron.yml
- fix(markdown): issue with angle brackets syntax in mermaid
- fix(workspace): updated timestamp not updating properly on save
- fix(workspace): copyNoteLink not getting updated title if note isn’t saved
- fix(views): dendron-next-server to pass port-forwarded url
Community
General Updates
Blog post
Growing Knowledge Bases from the Bottom Up
Traditionally, we view Dendron as a top-down hierarchy to sort information into. In our newest blog post, we’ll take a different angle and explore how using bottom-up approaches like links and tags can help us make the right decisions about how to extend our hierarchy.
Derek Sendoff
If you’ve checked out our Discord, you’ve probably come across Derek, our product evangelist. Derek is transitioning from his role as evangelist to community member and has the following words to share. If you have words you want to share, you can reply to Derek’s sendoff thread in Discord.
Hey! I’m Derek, also known as ScriptAutomate here in Discord and other social channels. I may have helped you with an onboarding session, answered some questions in an Office Hours, or helped with publishing your Dendron notes to the world. I wanted to take a moment to announce that I’m transitioning from a full-time team member to a community member, and to reflect on my time on the Dendron team.
I met Kevin Lin at a WriteTheDocs Meetup a few years ago, in Seattle, where he showed me an early version of Dendron. I was blown away. When Dendron was open sourced, and became a company, I wanted to jump in. I could see all the potential!
I was working on Salt Project, at VMware, before I joined Dendron. I worked in a unique role that was a combination of SRE and Technical Writer in open source projects. I love open source, and I knew that if I were to work somewhere else in a full-time role, it would need to be part of that world.
I wanted to help Dendron succeed, and share the power of it with others, so I took the leap and jumped in as a Dendron Evangelist last year.
Some big draws for me, about Dendron, were:
- Multi-vault: Being able to treat knowledge bases as plugins, especially with the initial version of Seeds. I’m looking forward to what vaults the community will continue to produce and create.
- Publishing: Publishing notes/documentation from multiple projects was a problem I ran into quite a bit with technical docs pipelines.
- Refactoring superpowers: Update all of your internal links, automatically, whenever you update your note names, hierarchies, and headers. This saves a lot of work whenever redesigning the structure of your notes.
- Asynchronous meetings, and everything written somewhere: The Dendron team runs in a unique fashion, avoiding meeting hell and making sure we document everything we are working on. This was a new way of working for me, and I loved it.
That’s just a snapshot. Dendron reminded me of what pop was doing in Python, approaching development as plugin-oriented knowledge from the start. The idea of pulling down vaults of knowledge, related to your favorite subjects and tools, directly into your own personal knowledge base like lego pieces was something I hadn’t seen before. I want to work toward making it a norm.
There are many things I’m interested in doing that include Dendron, and I want to make use of it wherever I can. I feel that I can serve Dendron well, as a community member, as I move forward to work on other content creation and open source projects (which will continue to include Dendron!) 🌱
Starboard and TIL Highlights
These are highlights from the Dendron Discord
#starboard
and#today-i-learned
channels.
- ⭐
cameron#9185
shared a link to a Google Docs update: “Google Docs is getting in on the Markdown game”
Dendron Reading Series
This week’s entry in the Dendron Reading Series.
Credit to
@kevins8#0590
for sharing the link for this week’s Dendron Reading Series!
As an engineer, its easy to conceptualize information as bits and believe that everything can be reduced to said bits. What Colour Are Your Bits? is a fantastic essay that explains why this isn’t true through the analogy of color.
The central claim: identical bits can have different colors (some property that is not captured by the bits) even when bits themselves do not have color.
An example that the essay uses is random numbers - while there is no difference, bit wise, from a set of numbers that is generated at random vs a set of numbers that are not, the means in which they were generated give each set a different color.
I think a lot of what is said about the color of bits can also apply to knowledge and the internalizing of knowledge. Identical knowledge (facts about the world) can have different colors - these colors come from how that knowledge was obtained.
The knowledge obtained from reading a fact has a different color than the same fact when it is recorded, and is colored differently yet again when it is experienced first hand. Not all knowledge is equal even when it is identical - the difference between information and wisdom lies in the coloring.
Event Reminders
- Office Hours: Visit the Office Hours page for notes from previous sessions.
- Community Teatime: Drink tea, eat food, and hangout with the Dendron crew!
- New User Tuesdays: Visit the New User Tuesdays page for notes from previous sessions.
- Greenhouse Talks: Visit the Greenhouse Talks page for notes from previous sessions.
- Subject: Publishing workflows with Dendron.
- Description: Interested speakers will present their workflows for publishing content, followed by an open discussion. The event will be recorded and later published online. This is a good opportunity to share tips and tricks about nifty things about your workflow, and ask for advice and input on challenges and pain-points in your current system.
- Next: Fri, Apr 29, 04:00 PM PDT / 23:00 UTC
- Greenhouse Talk Recordings - YouTube Playlist
Thank You’s
A big thanks to the following gardeners that brought up issues, contributions, and fixes to this release :man_farmer: :woman_farmer: Visit Discord Roles for more information.
-
Grndstt
@grndstt#1420
- #role.bugcatcher
- npx dendron publish init not finishing
-
Tika
@Tika#9526
-
Nickolay Kondratyev
@nickolay-kond#9861
-
Andrey Jef
@evanAndiez#9559
-
Saine
@Saine#4136
- #role.bugcatcher
- Backlink points to wrong URL
-
Slay
@Slaytanical#9737
- #role.bugcatcher
- Floating node dots in Note Graph
-
IrishAndyB
@IrishAndyB#8566
As Always: Community Resources
- Join the Dendron Discord
- Register for Dendron Events on Luma
- Follow Dendron on Twitter
- Follow Dendron on Mastodon
- Subscribe to Dendron on YouTube
- Checkout Dendron on GitHub
- Read the Dendron Blog
- Visit and bookmark the Dendron Smartpage