Everything I've Published Came out of One Obsidian Vault

When checking how much I have written over the years, it amazes me every time, and most of the inspirations, ideas, and brainstorm came initially from my Second Brain.

Below you see how notes helped elevate to full blown blog post or chapters of my book plus some numbers and how I published over the years.

Here’s the numbers as of today (2026-08-02):

The full break down of files, PDFs, imges and roughly what I have written vs. quoted or web clipped - I try to only count my own as much as possible, you see at the end Full Breakdown of Numbers.

Most blog article and book chapters started as a note I linked to other notes, and only later did the shape of a blog post or chapter I could use for my book.

Below you see some notes I created over the years, and how the lead into blog posts or book chapters. There’s 100 more, but just to give an example.

And it’s rarely one note becoming one article, it’s more often many notes converging into a single post. Three examples:

• Finding Flow grew out of notes like Deep Work, Music that keeps you focused, Productive Procrastination, Social Media Addiction and Journaling and many more.
• Why I Still Blog pulled together Writing from the Heart, Learning in Public, Compounding, Future of Blogging and more, see also linked notes in blog.
• and the same with book chapters: Materialized View vs. OBT vs. dbt vs. Traditional OLAP vs. DWA grew out of separate notes on Materialized Views, One Big Table, dbt, OLAP and Data Warehouse Automation, each one written years apart, that I only later saw were the same pattern.

I share the full details and code for the second brain at Public Second Brain with Quartz.

Here’s what’s published and what’s still private in my Second Brain:

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                    notes          words
All                 8,360      3,066,576
Published             660        308,421
Private             7,700      2,758,155
Archive               116         75,210
Active              8,244      2,991,366

What I have written vs. quoted (mostly web clipped):

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mine   2,284,330
quoted  191,287
clipped 372,787
skipped 205,586

Notes vs. images and PDFs - amazing 9k files and ~3 million words are only 27,4 MB big:

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                  files         size
Notes             9,621        27.4M
PDFs                 50        58.5M
Images            7,680         3.0G
Other                14         5.8M
─────
Total            17,365         3.1G

Or overall with my Patterns of Data Engineering book and Blog:

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                      files          words
Second Brain          8,361      3,067,475
Book chapters           105        157,089
Blog posts              103        329,934
─────
Total                 8,569      3,554,498

I was curious to see how many books that equate, Books Words and Pages they say a typical range is typical range is between ~125,000-150,000 words. That would be ~23 books I’ve written.

For sure, there are notes and things I have copied, or highlighted, or some other text I didn’t exclude, though I tried to exclude everything I know I added, such as my bible inside my second brain, that I haven’t written. But even if I only count half of it, let’s say 11-12 books, it’s still massive if you think about it.

• How to Take Notes in 2021? | ssp.sh: From 10 years of OneNote to Obsidian
• My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow | ssp.sh
• The Process of Smart Note-Taking | ssp.sh
• and some behind the scence of how I write in Why I Still Blog — and Why the Future of Blogging Is Connected | ssp.sh

More:

• Writing is Thinking
• Plaintext Files
• Future of Blogging

Origin: Public Second Brain with Quartz
References: OneNote