Case Studies

Knowledge Management & Obsidian

To make durable thinking easier — in public, in plugins, and in writing — long before today’s AI + notes stack became conventional.

Role

PKM, open source, and public knowledge systems

Timeline

Multi-year (Obsidian ecosystem & yomaru.dev)

Impact

Plugins, community use, and a wiki with tens of thousands of monthly views

Goal

Help people think in linked notes instead of scattered files: a local-first vault that stays fast, composable, and honest about incompleteness. I wanted the Obsidian experience to feel less like “yet another app” and more like a calm surface for serious work — including graph navigation, safer saves, frontmatter automation, and publishing ergonomics.

Problem

Early Obsidian rewarded curiosity, but the edges were rough: plugins conflicted, metadata drifted, large vaults strained the UI, and publishing was awkward. Before “Claude + Obsidian” was a common pairing, there was little shared infrastructure for the workflows power users were inventing every week. The gap was not information — it was structure: repeatable patterns and small tools that made good habits the default.

Solution

I shipped a set of focused open-source plugins (see below) and maintained yomaru.dev, a public knowledge wiki that turned into a steady traffic surface — tens of thousands of views each month — where ideas could be indexed, linked, and improved in the open. The work sat at the intersection of developer ergonomics and learning design: small affordances that compound when thousands of vaults adopt them.

Achievement

  • Early mover in PKM + Obsidian — building and maintaining plugins and patterns well before AI-in-notes workflows went mainstream.
  • Eight public repositories spanning graph UX, save hooks, incomplete-file workflows, publish URLs, frontmatter and tag generators, image captions, and a better plugin settings page (with TopTierTools).
  • yomaru.dev wiki — sustained readership (tens of thousands of views per month) as a living reference for the community.
  • Ongoing stance — as AI makes raw knowledge cheap and accessible, knowledge management itself evolves. I have stepped back from day-to-day Obsidian ecosystem maintenance, but I keep re-evaluating what actually matters for learning: judgment, taste, synthesis, and the discipline to close loops — not merely collecting answers.

Open source (GitHub)

★ 310 stars 17 forks8 repos