docs-as-flashcards

Docs are boring, but very important.

I am a working professional. I have a metric ton of information for various technologies I need crammed into my brain to perform day to day tasks.

101’s, bootcamps, and introductory courses haven’t cut it for a long time at this point in my career, it only matters that I know certain tooling deeply. To this extent, the only thing that really does the trick is reading and understanding the official documentation.

Equally unfortunately is that few tasks are as potent a sedative 😪.

For me personally, a more engaging learning path was necessary in order to make sure I could keep all the information I need at front of mind. Solving this pain point is why docs-as-flashcards exists.

Anki is an open-source flashcard app freely available on desktop and mobile (search for it in your favorite app store). docs-as-flashcards projects accept specially formatted Markdown files that I authored as input, and generates Anki-compatile flashcard decks as output. Instructions on how to download and import these decks into Anki is provided. The flashcards themselves reflect the content of official documentation, and each flashcard is tagged according to where exactly in the docs the information was derived from. So when you study a flashcard, you can look at the tag and trace it back to exactly what page it came from in the official docs, and vice versa.

Current offerings:

• asa55 Azure Virtual Machines Docs flashcard deck derived from these official docs
• asa55 Azure Virtual Network Docs flashcard deck derived from these official docs
• asa55 Azure Blob Storage Docs flashcard deck derived from these official docs