I got a copy of Pragmatic Thinking and Learning when it came out a while ago, and I just finished reading it. I really wish I’d read it before I embarked on a PhD!

As my girlfriend pointed out, it is basically a psychology textbook, with an onus on learning, but it’s presented in that great informal, geek-accessible style that you’ll probably only have come across in other pragmatic programmers books.

I have to admit that reading it in bed probably wasn’t the best place, since it made following the advice like “If your software isn’t set up with a safety net (version control, unit testing and automation), you need to get that implemented right away. Put the book down. I’ll wait.” slightly harder to follow, but I still got a heck of a lot out of it, including the idea of an exocortex.

An exocortex is basically an external information-processing memory device thing which augments your brain. Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando (which is available online) will help explain, if you’re interested. For now though, we have to make do with (normal) computers to augment us, so that basically means wikis.

Inspired by a couple of screenshots in Pragmatic Thinking and Leaning, I searched the web for a wiki that runs inside of TextMate, and stored everything in flat files. I found Plain Text Wiki, a bundle which did some of what I wanted, including exporting to HTML, and following links by pressing ⌅

I created a fork on GitHub, and set about modifying it. Changes I’ve made include fixing the backend to work on my Mac, copying the matkdown language grammar into it (since TM’s markdown grammar isn’t really extensible), and a wiki mapper.

For the mapper, I’ve used nodebox, and a short script to generate nodebox code and fire it up. The results look like this (and are animated in nodebox):

Feel free to fork it yourself. I’ve got lots of ideas, like moving to a git based wiki system (like git-wiki), auto-publishing, and using a templating system.