athal7/knowledge-base

The knowledge base at ~/.local/share/kb/ is a distilled, maintained view of people, projects, and decisions.

Structure

• people/<slug>.md — person profiles
• products/<slug>.md — product profiles (umbrella products with real surface area / repos)
• projects/<slug>.md — project profiles (workstreams; each links to its parent product)
• decisions/cross-cutting.md — org/process decisions not tied to a product or project
• decisions/archive.md — historical decision log (not actively maintained)
• journal/YYYY-MM-DD.md — daily dev journal
• names.json — display name → canonical name (people)
• projects.json — variant name → canonical name (projects, empty string = suppress)
• product-labels.json — Linear label → product/project slug
• github-repos.json — repo name → product/project slug

People profiles

Distilled reference cards, not meeting logs. Omit any section with no information.

---
type: person
email: [email protected]
slack: U123ABC
github: janesmith
title: Engineering Lead
team: Platform
aliases:
  - Jane
  - J. Smith
projects:
  - "[[Shield]]"
  - "[[Auth Service]]"
last_updated: 2026-06-02
---
# Jane Smith
## Current
- Leading infrastructure migration on [[Shield]]
- Key contact for enterprise onboarding on [[Auth Service]]
## Style
- Prefers short threads over long documents
- Direct, action-oriented
## Personal
- Based in Portland, two kids
## Key Decisions
- Deprecate old UI in favor of portal automation (2026-01)
- Move analytics to PostHog (2026-04)

Contact fields live in frontmatter properties (email, slack, github, title, team) and the body holds only the heading and sections. The slack property is a raw id (wrap it as <@id> when posting to chat); github is a raw handle. aliases lists the person's name variants so links and search resolve. projects is a quoted-[[wikilink]] list that mirrors the [[Project]] links in the Current section, so the person↔project relationship is queryable from frontmatter.

Rules: preserve the contact properties (never drop email/slack/github/title/team). Preserve the projects relationship list and keep it in sync with the [[Project]] wikilinks in Current (quote each entry so it parses). Drop stale Current items (>2 weeks, no recent mention). Max 5 Current, max 10 Key Decisions. Use [[Project Name]] wikilinks in Current.

When looking up a person: read their profile first. Contact info lives in the frontmatter properties — use the email or slack id directly. The slack property is a raw id; wrap it as <@id> when messaging.

Product profiles

Products are the umbrella offerings with real surface area and one or more associated repos (like Scanner or Shield). Same shape as a project, but type: product and a repos: list of the repo names that make up the product.

---
type: product
status: active
linear: label:scanner
github: https://github.com/myorg/scanner
repos:
  - scanner
  - scanner-cli
aliases:
  - the scanner
  - scanner product
people:
  - "[[Jane Smith]]"
last_updated: 2026-06-01
---
# Scanner
## Status
- Public launch shipped; onboarding rethink in progress
## Key Decisions
- "Probes" is the canonical term for scanner-focused messaging (2026-03)
## People
- [[Jane Smith]] — engineering lead

Link fields and status work as on projects; repos lists the associated repo names so the product↔repo relationship is queryable from frontmatter. Projects point to their parent product via the product: property, so a product gathers the workstreams beneath it. Because a product spans many Linear projects rather than mapping to one, its linear field is a label filter (e.g. label:<product>), not a single project URL — and it may be omitted entirely if the product has no dedicated label. (Single-project workstreams that map to one Linear project still use a project URL — see Project profiles.)

Project profiles

---
type: project
status: active
product: "[[Scanner]]"
linear: https://linear.app/myorg/project/shield
github: https://github.com/myorg/shield
aliases:
  - shield-service
  - the shield
people:
  - "[[Jane Smith]]"
  - "[[Bob Chen]]"
last_updated: 2026-06-01
---
# Shield
## Status
- Active development, migrating from monolith to microservices
- Blocked on [[Auth Service]] dependency
## Key Decisions
- Use Rust for core service (2026-03)
- GCS for storage, not Vertex (2026-04)
## People
- [[Jane Smith]] — engineering lead
- [[Bob Chen]] — infrastructure

Link fields and status live in frontmatter properties. product is a quoted-[[wikilink]] to the parent product, so the project↔product relationship is queryable from frontmatter (and a product's workstreams can be gathered by querying for it). linear and github are full URLs (a label filter is acceptable for linear on umbrella projects); aliases lists the project's name variants so links and search resolve. people is a quoted-[[wikilink]] list that mirrors the ## People section, so the project↔person relationship is queryable from frontmatter.

Rules: preserve the link and status properties (never drop linear/github/status). Preserve the people relationship list and keep it in sync with the [[Person]] wikilinks in the ## People section (quote each entry so it parses). status is one of active, blocked, paused, or archived. Use [[Person Name]] wikilinks in People, [[Project Name]] in Status.

What counts as a project: a durable product, service, or named workstream (like the Shield example above) — not a single feature, ticket, infra task, or one-off activity. Fold features, bug-fixes, infra tasks, and completed one-liners into the parent project's Status as bullets rather than creating a new file. Time-bound or phase-style efforts (a release hotfix, a single campaign phase) belong in the issue tracker, not here. Before creating a new project file, check the existing alias mappings — the work is usually a variant of an existing project. Aim for a small set of substantive profiles, not many stubs.

Linking to Linear: resolve a project's **Linear**: field to a real project URL (https://linear.app/<workspace>/project/<slug>, where <workspace> is the team's Linear workspace slug — discover it from the existing Linear URLs already in the KB or from chezmoi data, don't hard-code it here). Match the project name against Linear's project list. For umbrella projects that span many Linear projects, a label filter (e.g. label:<product>) is acceptable instead of a single URL. Never invent a URL — if no confident match exists, leave the field off and note it.

Decisions

Decisions are anchored to the thing they're about. Record each decision in the relevant product's or project's ## Key Decisions section, dated YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD:

## Key Decisions
- Use Rust for core service (2026-03)
- GCS for storage, not Vertex (2026-04)

When a later decision supersedes an earlier one, keep only the latest. Genuinely cross-cutting org or process decisions — ones that don't belong to any single product or project (onboarding, standup cadence, team logistics, tooling and convention choices) — go in decisions/cross-cutting.md. The historical decision log lives in decisions/archive.md and is not actively maintained; treat it as a read-only record of past context, not a place to add new decisions.

Journal

Daily coding activity per project, with diff stats:

# 2026-05-22
## Shield
- Fix auth token refresh race condition
- Add integration tests for session middleware
- *5 sessions, 12 files changed, +340/-120 lines*
## dotfiles
- Update knowledge base skill
- *2 sessions, 3 files changed, +87/-40 lines*

Coding-stats source: opencode's local session store (~/.local/share/opencode/storage/session) is pruned to roughly the last few months, so it cannot supply older session counts or diff stats — derive journal stats from git instead. Beware that git log --all double-counts pre-squash and merged copies of the same work and includes bot commits (e.g. reg_actions, argocd-image-updater); filter to the human author and dedupe so the stats stay honest.

Name resolution

names.json maps display name variants to canonical names: {"Joe": "Joseph Martinez", "J. Martinez": "Joseph Martinez"}. Check before creating a new profile — the person may exist under a different name.

projects.json maps project name variants to canonical names: {"the shield": "Shield", "shield-service": "Shield"}. Empty string value means suppress (noise, not a real project). Update both files when encountering new name variants.

Each profile's aliases frontmatter property mirrors the variants from these maps for that canonical name, so links to [[variant]] resolve and the variants surface in search. Keep the JSON maps and the per-file aliases in sync: when adding a variant to a map, add it to the matching profile's aliases too.

Enriching profiles

When you encounter new contact info (email, chat handle, GitHub handle, title, team) from any source — calendar attendees, chat messages, email headers, commit authors — update the person's profile.

Searching

• Find a person: cat ~/.local/share/kb/people/<slug>.md
• Find a product: cat ~/.local/share/kb/products/<slug>.md
• Find a project: cat ~/.local/share/kb/projects/<slug>.md
• Find a decision: check the relevant product/project ## Key Decisions first, then cat ~/.local/share/kb/decisions/cross-cutting.md; older context is in decisions/archive.md
• Search across KB: grep -r "search term" ~/.local/share/kb/
• Search journal: grep -r "search term" ~/.local/share/kb/journal/