[kamomkoian]

How do you organize technical articles you read?

I read a lot of backend and architecture articles and often struggle to revisit them later.

I’m curious how others handle this.

Do you: Use Notion or Obsidian? Bookmark everything? Keep markdown notes? Rely on memory?

What has worked long-term for you?

What hasn’t?

[btrettel]

A directory hierarchy works well for me. I've described my setup online before:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/173314/31143

https://www.reddit.com/r/datacurator/comments/p75xlu/how_i_o...

I don't read everything I have from start to finish. A lot of this is for future reference.

Since that StackExchange post, I'm now up to about 36.6K PDF files in 4.4K directories, with 14.5K symlinks so I can put files in multiple directories.

I also have a separate version controlled repo with notes a bunch of subjects. I'm planning to eventually merge my PDF hierarchy and the notes to have a unified system. It's going to have to be done in stages.

[kyboren]

How many GB is your PDF collection? Have you considered sharing it more widely?

I know about Sci-Hub, Anna's Archive, etc., but I'm not so interested in a giant landfill containing all papers ever written. I'm much more interested in a curated collection of useful papers.

[kamomkoian]

That’s an impressive and thoughtfully structured system, especially at that scale. The use of symlinks and a separate version-controlled notes repository makes a lot of sense for long-term archival.

I’m curious — when working with such a large collection, how do you typically rediscover material or connect related ideas across different parts of the hierarchy? Do you rely primarily on directory structure, full-text search, or your notes as the main index?

And as you move toward merging the PDFs and notes into a unified system, do you see the notes becoming the central navigation layer, or will the directory structure remain primary?