Structured Syllabus

Initial Problem {#initial-problem}

As I keep navigating my way through school it seems to me that there could be some improvements to my note taking. Right now I generate a class or assignment on an ad-hoc basis, manually tracking the lecture and assignment number. It's a decent amount of things to keep track of and as a result it didn't really get done. Additionally, my use of obsidian is limited by the many bells and whistles slowing it down on my mobile devices, and since I don't type up my notes initially, there's a bit of friction to the ingestion.

Initial Solution {#initial-solution}

I was dabbling with traversing structured data for a work study project and it struck me that it would make sense for a syllabus to be structured data. So I sketched out my classes as yaml files and tried generating notes based off a templater.js script. It works okay!

Future Improvements {#future-improvements}

I want to transfer it from being an obsidian-native solution to being something platform-agnostic. I want to work it into my implementation of joshcanhelp's pdpl project, so I can ingest the yaml syllabi and have it spit out a semester's worth of lecture notes and assignment markdown files at a time, with all the homework due dates all laid out, along with a ical file for import to calendar software.

I plan on working it into pdpl's obsidian export functionality so I can use that, and add an org-mode export feature as well, as I seem to be using that more and more.