Silicon Notes
"Somewhat lightweight, low-friction" is how Silicon Notes' author describes the personal
knowledge base - written after DokuWiki's editor "drove me mad" and no existing wiki quite
fit. The philosophy is that small frequent annoyances compound into cognitive load with no
return, so everything here is optimized for frictionless daily use. Notes are written in
plaintext Markdown and rendered as clean HTML with Pygments syntax highlighting for code
blocks; pages get bi-directional relationships (backlinks), so the knowledge base becomes a
connected web rather than a folder tree; and full-text plus title search retrieves anything
fast. A table of contents lives in the left sidebar - "where it belongs" - editable while you
read without scrolling away. Page history tracks revisions for auditing and rollback, JSON
export/import keeps everything portable, and the mobile layout is genuinely usable. The stack
is deliberately minimal: Python and Flask with Mistune for Markdown and SQLite for storage -
no big frameworks, just a few small dependencies. One honest caveat: there is no built-in
authentication, so deploy it behind a VPN, private network, or reverse-proxy auth layer. For a
solo engineer's brain, it is exactly enough.
Deploy