Ultimate Notetaking: My Neovim Zettelkasten Based on Obsidian - Complete Walkthrough

If you're new to my channel, I'm Mischa van den Burg. I help ambitious professionals break into tech and scale their DevOps careers. Our community brings together over 400 paying members who are transforming their careers in tech.

How I got here...

28 yrs old: Left my nursing career to start from scratch in tech
29 yrs old: Taught myself DevOps while working full-time
30 yrs old: Landed my first junior DevOps position in just 6 months
31 yrs old: Doubled my salary by securing my first consulting role
32 yrs old: Built an advanced Kubernetes homelab, started sharing online
33 yrs old: Became a Microsoft MVP, grew to 34,000+ YouTube subscribers
34 yrs old: Built the fastest-growing DevOps community on Skool
Today: Running multiple 6-figure DevOps contracts while teaching others

Our community now has:

• 400+ paying members
• 40+ hours of premium courses
• 92% success rate in career transitions
• Members doubling their salaries in less than 12 months

Want proof this works? Google me.
Check my GitHub (400+ stars).
Look up my Microsoft MVP status.
Thousands of 5 star reviews on several platforms.

To all the career changers and ambitious engineers: Your past doesn't determine your future. I went from nurse to highly-paid DevOps consultant in 18 months. The worse the struggle, the better the comeback.

You either level up your career or get an epic story trying. Both mean you win.

Keep building,

Mischa

FULL DISCLOSURE

I create content to build trust with ambitious professionals. The best ones join our premium community, where we help them accelerate their careers. Simple as that.

[mischavandenburg]

Get access to premium content about DevOps, Kubernetes & Note-taking:

[Wynell]

Wow! I just finished watching your workflow video and went to see if you have a Zettelkasten one, and yep, you just uploaded it!

[RobFieldingz]

You have inspired my journey into knowledge management. And to come back to vim with your neovim series. I keep coming back to dig deeper into each topics. Many thanks for your videos, and showcasing the level of integration you have achieved.

[wavedepletion]

Thanks for this! I've been working on my own neovim-based notes system for years before discovering Zettelkasten etc., and it's been fun integrating a few of these ideas into my own project. Really helpful to see how someone else has been doing it. Wrote my own zet script to drop quick ideas into an Inbox/scratch folder while watching this.

[StephenAllinson]

This is a great video. The hour flew by. I will be watching it again and taking notes! The bash script for day notes is going right into my daily flow.

Thanks for sharing! This is years of information condensed into a single video.

[devopstoolbox]

Hi Mischa! Loved the video!
Fellow ops engineer here.
I created content about pretty much the same topic recently and planning a workshop about it, I love it how watching someone else's content completely opens your eyes to new possibilities / workflow and other options.
Great stuff! Thank you for this!

[nschutten]

Excellent, inspirational and instructive video! I normally stay away from videos that are longer than 30min, but I am really happy I watched yours. I have learned a lot from your insights and workflow and will be sure to use (some of) it in my daily life.

[krzysztofkaminski]

Perfect combination of vim and Obsidian. Great video and examples. Found few nuggets to incorporate into my workflow.

[scirons]

That workflow is amazing! My main question is: How you managing your calendar and tasks, and integrating it with your ecosystem? That's the core reason I haven't migrated out of org yet.

[sintesek]

I had a few tries of making my own note system and faced some big issues that stopped me each time.
Your video is full of useful concepts and tips. Honestly it's just great. I feel really inspired. Now I know what I need to do to make a convenient note taking system for myself.
So, I really appreciate you.

[azcii]

Thanks for sharing!
Are right now in the process of changing my whole working environment and workflow. You are really helping me find my way.

[ripper]

This video was very well organised and formatted to precisely communicate the ideas with a clear structure.

[matthias]

Thanks a lot for the insight into your method. For a long time in my life I've got along without taking notes, keeping everything in my head. But I've been struggeling for some time now, since it has become overwhelming at some point. Your videos gave me the motivation to implement a similar system for myself and provide some very usefull information on how to start. Cheers from Germany.

[nizexlizzy]

3 questions: 1) How are you drawing on the canvas? I can’t get obsidian on my ipad to allow me to write directly onto the canvas. 2) What are you using to get the cool lines between all of your elements? 3) What font are you using?

Thanks,

[naturewalkingwithyou]

Brilliant. Detailed, well explained and I'm going to adopt this way for myself.

[phong]

I wish I could do this, been learning Vim for about 2 years and still feel like a completely beginner, keep it up mate.

[marcocampione]

I was waiting for this video after the workflow one . Thank you very much for your videos ❤

[tetbundy]

This is awesome. Just downloaded obsidian, wrote a few notes and i already have some links as well!!

[TimmyTheRookie]

I'm also coming from a technical background (life science), and have landed on some similar combinations such as yours. I'm not enough of a programmer yet to employ VIM properly, but I see the value and plan to invest more into using these other tools around editing text and plaintext files, as well as git, to have a future-proof and robust underlying system.

I also love the principles of zettelkasten - quick drafting, into review and refinement, into atomic, dense final notes - great for learning topics and greating your own sort of wiki.

But now in the real world, just like you, there is some actual organisation that is very useful sometimes. I see with many other creators list the loose nature of links and notes as a benefit for the creativep rocess, but for large technical projects it is different. Whether it is a project which will contain a bunch of different notes of all kinds (i.e i could have a company as a project, with client lists and communications; doing market research; combining a bunch of information for various documents/applications). It's all good and all to have no structure and atomic notes, but very often it's more important to have a compiled, nonatomic note relating to a topic instead to answer specific questions here and now, which i can also share with other people; and in others it's important to separate specific information for confidentiality or similar reasons.

How do you decide whether something ends up as a "resource" or atomized into zettelkasten? Most of actual workflow will go into active projects obviously + perhaps some time on the side just improving yourself in some area, but without entangling yourself in constant restructuring existing information and formatting it from the looser compiled format within projects, how does the information transform from thereon out? I would love to hear how a workflow of a active project, with all its inefficiencies that come with working within time limits and other groups looks like for you.

[Chocoholic]

Amazing video! I'm excited to start implementing a lot of your methods into my own ways of living. Thank you for that.

I had one question: You mention, around 1:06:15 that you don't actively use tags and that you don't see the value in it much - and that you'll likely stop doing it unless it's for your blog.
If you're not using tags, then how is the whole 3d 'mindmap' created and how is information tied together?