Why I Keep a Pinboard

There's a corkboard on the wall behind my monitor. It's covered in index cards, printouts, and a few sticky notes that have long since lost their stickiness and are now held up with brass thumbtacks.

People ask me why I bother with it when everything is in Notion, or Linear, or some other tool that syncs across all my devices and lets me search with natural language.

The answer is spatial memory.

The problem with infinite canvases

Digital tools are infinitely flexible. That's their strength and their failure mode. When you can put anything anywhere, you have to make a decision every time you add something: where does this live? That decision has a cost. It fragments attention.

A physical pinboard has constraints. There's only so much wall. That scarcity forces prioritization. What's important enough to occupy physical space?

How I use it

Each card represents one active concern — a problem I'm working through, a concept I'm trying to understand, or a decision I haven't made yet. I move cards around when their relationship to other cards changes. I take cards down when a concern is resolved.

The spatial arrangement is the information. Cards near each other are related. Cards at the top are urgent. Cards off to the side are parked.

When I sit down to work, I glance at the board. My brain indexes the whole thing in about two seconds. No scrolling. No search. No clicking through layers of folders.

What this site is

This website is my attempt at a digital analog to that corkboard. Not a blog in the traditional sense — not a linear feed of posts in reverse chronological order.

A pinboard. Things get pinned when they're relevant. They stay up as long as they're still alive.

Some will be tutorials. Some will be half-formed notes. Some will be corrections to things I wrote before.

That's the idea. Welcome.