About Me

Hi! I’m Nicole. I’m a nerd about: personal knowledge management, Obsidian, note-taking, TTRPGs, software performance, load testing, software engineering, site reliability engineering, developer advocacy, reading, writing, videos, YouTube, languages, travelling, flag theory, the queer community, intersectionality, learning in public, and many more.

Me posing with a camera

This site

Here’s what you can find here, as well as some information on how it’s all put together:

Blog is a chronological log of work I’ve published, including articles, videos, conference talks, and podcasts. It’s a way of collecting everything I’m doing in one place. I publish it using Hugo on GitHub Pages.

Notes is a public repository of (most of) my personal notes. I use Obsidian to take notes about all the things I’m interested in, and publish them in all their messiness in the spirit of learning in public. I use Obsidian Publish to publish them.

Work contains a list of my current personal projects as well as my professional employment history.

Speaking is a list of public talks I’ve given, online or in person. Each one has a link to the slides I used and, where possible, a video of the talk. The slides are mostly created with the Obsidian Advanced Slides plugin, which uses RevealJS, and are published using GitHub Pages and Hugo.

Course is a link to my course, Obsidian for Everyone, which teaches you how to start using Obsidian from scratch. It’s for complete beginners, and includes everything you need to know, short of using community plugins. It is hosted on Podia, which I use as a digital product platform.

Book is a link to my in-progress book, Doing It in Public, which is about learning in public. I’m writing the book itself in public to get early feedback and to practice what I preach. I’m writing it in iA Writer and Obsidian, and publishing it using Quartz and GitHub Pages.

Other pages

Here are some other pages you might be interested in:

  • Ethics is a page about my ethics and values, specifically in relation to how I work and play online.
  • Gear is a page outlining all the hardware I use.
  • Affiliates is a page listing all the companies I have affiliate links with.

Contact

In a perfect world, I would have the time to answer everyone. Unfortunately, I don’t. I’m sorry about that! I try to be responsive, but please don’t take it personally if I don’t answer you. Having said that, here’s the order in which I answer personal questions or requests:

  • Sign up for my Patreon. I prioritize questions asked there.
  • Join my Discord server. I’m on Discord every day, and I find it more manageable than email.
  • Send me a message on Mastodon. I’m particularly active on the server I own with my friend Andy Polaine, pkm.social.
  • Comment on my recent videos. I try to respond to most, if not all comments, in the first few hours of a video being posted.
  • If you have a business inquiry, email me. If you have a personal question, though, this is the worst way to contact me.

Please don’t contact me about:

  • placing ads on my site
  • cross-posting or doing guest posts on my site
  • doing a link exchange
  • doing a lot of work for you for free

(If you do, I will say no or likely ignore you.)