Ben Holmes

Notetaking is a beautiful thing. Putting thoughts to paper (or keyboard, or transcription model) refines your thinking, connects ideas, and pulls context out of your brain for others to learn from.

But as powerful as a good notetaking system can be, organizing those notes is a chore. A few files turn into folders, tags, and taxonomies that become unwieldy beyond the first hundred entries. If you can't find what you wrote, or miss connections to related ideas, you're missing the real value of notetaking: generating new ideas.

Agents dramatically expanded what's possible here. Andre Karpathy popularized the idea of an "LLM Knowledge Base." Or in simpler terms, letting Claude Code turn your loose Markdown notes into a neat, organized wiki.

We'll explore workflows to make this possible, ranging from simple to complex:
- Build automations to organize your notes with tags, folders, backlinks, and deduplication to level-up search and discovery
- Teach agents to create a wiki you can navigate with Obsidian
- Expand from wikis to web applications to create kanban boards, knowledge graphs, whiteboard canvases, and more
- Have agents expand your thinking by auto-recording ideas while you sleep
- Connect third party data sources like Granola meeting notes or Notion databases to link your notes to your day-to-day work
You'll walk away with a new appreciation for notetaking, and a second brain that leaves you 10x smarter than one brain alone.

Talk format: Code and live tech demos. I will set up each of these automations and tools from scratch, and show agents executing each of them in a live setting. I will share the source for all automations at the end.

React server components (RSCs) are a huge paradigm shift for React. You might even ask if NextJS and server components are the same thing (spoiler: they're not!) This talk demystifies how RSCs *really* work outside the framework. We'll build our own Node server, hook up the RSC renderer by hand, and understand the bundling and routing logic to ship a server component to your browser. Yes, all with live coding. What could go wrong...?

Picking up a new technology, developers stick with defaults. It's a fact that every tool from JQuery to NextJS has needed to face. At their worst, defaults ship hundreds of wasted JS kilobytes for routing, state, and other baggage developers may never use. But at their best, defaults give us a simple baseline to start from, with a clear path to add the exact set of features our project demands. This is the magic of opt-in design.
Let's see how smart defaults guide modern frontend tools from Astro to React Server Components, and why this new era reshapes your workflow, and performance metrics, for the better.