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. Because I write everything (my notes, blogs and my book) in Markdown, it’s easy to count them, which I did below.

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.

This is essentially the difference between writing and curating a note over time, and compressing it into a single timely blog:

I’ve also written about the compounding effects of note-taking, and how knowledge can grow similar to money, passively, if you start connecting and adding to it. In the end,
everything does compound.

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

As of 2026-08-02 , 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.

To document the progress of my book writing, I created a little script that outputs words written over time.

Markdown files in my Obsidian Vault:

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find ~/Simon/Sync/SecondBrain -type f -name "*.md" | wc -l

or another one:

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find src -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -name '*.md' -exec cat {} \; | wc -w

Explanation:

• find /path/to/your/obsidian/vault: Searches the specified directory.
• -type f: Ensures that only files are considered (not directories).
• -name "*.md": Filters the search to only include files with the .md extension.
• | wc -l: Counts the number of lines output by the find command, which corresponds to the number of Markdown files.

.

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$=dv.pages().length

Interesting is to count the words over time. As I have everything in git, I loop over git logs with this script words-history.sh:

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#!/bin/bash

last_count=0

# Iterate over each commit
git log --reverse --pretty=format:"%H %ad" --date=short | while read hash date; do
    # Check out the commit
    git checkout $hash &> /dev/null

    # Count the words in markdown files
    words=$(find src -type f -not -path '*/\.*' -name '*.md' -exec cat {} + | wc -w)
    
    # Compare with the last count and output only if different
    if [ "$words" -ne "$last_count" ]; then
        echo "$date,$words"
        last_count=$words
    fi
done

# Check out the original branch
git checkout main

Now I can run below in my Makefile:

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./words-history.sh > stats/stats-words.csv

With Rill Developer, I imported and created CSV and made a dashboard with

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rill init
rill start

Simple is beauty.

• 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
• Obsidian Search (lots of files)
• Books Words and Pages

More:

• Writing is Thinking
• Plaintext Files
• Future of Blogging

Origin: My Counting Words written in Markdown with DEDP book
References: Markdown, OneNote