Hey all!
I’m glad to finally be creating an account. I’ve been lurking around here for some time (and the google group, and the github repo). I’ve been online since the halcyon Bulletin Board days before algorithms, so I like to start with an intro (so folks know what they are getting into).
I’m a software engineer by trade with about 20 years of experience, primarily in C#, Node.js, and TypeScript/Angular on the frontend, with AWS and GCP for infrastructure. I’ve spent most of my career doing backend and full-stack work, so I’m comfortable poking around under the hood of most things - which is part of why TiddlyWiki appealed to me immediately.
My partner and I have been traveling full-time internationally since 2020 - we call ourselves the Flomads (it used to mean Floating Nomads, but now it’s Nomads going with the Flow). We spent a good chunk of time living aboard a sailboat in Florida and the Bahamas, and before that we did long-term rentals in Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, and currently UK. These days we’re doing extended pet sits and rentals, aiming for stays of two months or more. Ecuadorian citizenship and a self-sufficient finca are the long-term goal.
That lifestyle puts some interesting constraints on tooling. I need things that work offline, don’t depend on subscriptions that might not be available in rural Ecuador, and that I can back up to a USB stick and hand to someone who’s never heard of the cloud. TiddlyWiki checks every one of those boxes. It just works, without depending on anything I can’t copy locally. That’s the whole pitch for me. And since I just finished listening to the The Martian again, I feel required to say that Jeremy is a steely-eyed-wiki-man.
I came to TiddlyWiki looking for a personal knowledge base, and it’s grown into several overlapping use cases:
- General knowledge base / commonplace book - quotes, ideas, research threads, things I want to remember. The kind of thing that would have been a physical journal in another era.
- Route and passage planning for sailing - waypoints, anchorage notes, weather patterns, tidal windows, marina details. I wanted something I could reference offline at anchor without worrying about whether the marina had wifi.
- Homesteading and self-sufficiency research - which brings me to…
The zombie apocalypse pipeline
Like a lot of nerds of my age, I went through a stereotypical zombie apocalypse phase: what would I actually need to survive, what skills matter, what systems are robust when everything else fails. That eventually matured (mostly) into a genuine interest in self-sufficient societies, intentional communities, homesteading, permaculture, anarchism, and sustainable food systems. The Flomads’ finca dream is the practical expression of that. TiddlyWiki has become the running notebook for all of it — crop guilds, water catchment, building materials, seed saving, community governance models.
Some of the things I’m thinking about, have half-built, or am hoping to get input on from this community:
- Geospatial crop planning tool - I’ve had an idea kicking around for a TiddlyWiki-integrated (or companion) tool that ties geolocation to something like Farmer’s Almanac data to surface what crops are viable in a given area, what the growing windows look like, frost dates, etc. Essentially a “you are here, here’s what you can grow” widget. Curious if anyone has done anything in this space.
- Offline-first data integrity - best practices for keeping a TiddlyWiki that lives across multiple devices (and occasionally unreliable internet) from drifting out of sync.
- Wikitext vs. structured data tradeoffs - I keep bumping into cases where I want something to behave more like a database and less like a document. How far is too far to push TiddlyWiki in that direction before you’re fighting the tool?
- Mapping and spatial tiddlers - integrating Leaflet or similar for route planning and geographic notes. Has anyone done this well?
- Plugin ecosystem for long-form writing - I do a fair amount of project planning and structured writing; curious what people use for organizing larger bodies of work within TiddlyWiki (I’m actually working on a plugin for this right now, and I’ll post when I’ve got an MVP - maybe within a week or two).
- Survival/resilience knowledge bases - I suspect there are others here building TiddlyWikis oriented around self-sufficiency, off-grid living, or preparedness. Would love to compare notes.
Looking forward to lurking less and contributing more. This community seems like exactly the kind of place where the weird intersections of my interests might actually make sense to people. And yeah, I used my local agent to create this draft, and then edited it. It’s just a tool, and not nearly as good as people expect, but still useful.
