> which is almost never how systems work or how I tend to think of them. As a concrete example of where this was recently useful for me, consider the organizat

> which is almost never how systems work or how I tend to think of them. As a concrete example of where this was recently useful for me, consider the organization of my blog post on software architecture: https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2021/06/django-for-startup-founders-a-better-software-architecture-for-saas-startups-and-consumer-apps.html https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2021/06/django-for... The reason why it's (imho) generally lucid and well organized is because I put all the bullet notes that I had into FreeMind, so I was able to easily drag them around and see the connections between the ideas. This is what allowed me to eventually figure out what the larger themes were. Even if systems aren't hierarchical in their natural state, we tend to have represent them hierarchically in order to share with others -- e.g. in a blog post, a book, a YouTube video, etc. And so being able to have insights around hierarchy, and organize your thinking around hierarchy, tends to be useful. In terms of programming, even ten years later I still put everything I learn into the same mindmap. So most recently this has been Angular (and the upgrade process from AngularJS), Kubernetes (for consulting), Typescript, etc. It's definitely a lifesaver for documenting obscure AWS operations that I only need a few times a year, but where it would be a huge pain to have to go back to the original AWS documentation each time. E.g. using FreeMind it takes me 10 seconds to figure out how to tail the logs from my beanstalk instances, whereas just using Google that would be an ordeal.