🧠 Sharpen your thinking with a second brain
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🧠 Sharpen your thinking with a second brain

Oct 26, 2023·
Joyce Ma
Joyce Ma
· 2 min read
Image credit: Unsplash
blog

Create a personal knowledge base and share your knowledge with your peers.

Hugo Blox web framework empowers you with one of the most flexible note-taking capabilities out there.

Create a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

Use it as your second brain, either publicly sharing your knowledge with your peers via your website, or via a private GitHub repository and password-protected site just for yourself.

Mindmaps

Hugo Blox supports a Markdown extension for mindmaps.

With this open format, can even edit your mindmaps in other popular tools such as Obsidian.

Simply insert a Markdown code block labelled as markmap and optionally set the height of the mindmap as shown in the example below.

Mindmaps can be created by simply writing the items as a Markdown list within the markmap code block, indenting each item to create as many sub-levels as you need:


```markmap {height="200px"}
- Hugo Modules
  - Hugo Blox
  - netlify
  - netlify-cms
  - slides
```

renders as

- Hugo Modules
  - Hugo Blox
  - netlify
  - netlify-cms
  - slides

Anh here’s a more advanced mindmap with formatting, code blocks, and math:


```markmap
- Mindmaps
  - Links
    - [Hugo Blox Docs](https://docs.hugoblox.com/)
    - [Discord Community](https://discord.gg/z8wNYzb)
    - [GitHub](https://github.com/HugoBlox/kit)
  - Features
    - Markdown formatting
    - **inline** ~~text~~ *styles*
    - multiline
      text
    - `inline code`
    - Math: $x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}$
```

renders as

- Mindmaps
  - Links
    - [Hugo Blox Docs](https://docs.hugoblox.com/)
    - [Discord Community](https://discord.gg/z8wNYzb)
    - [GitHub](https://github.com/HugoBlox/kit)
  - Features
    - Markdown formatting
    - **inline** ~~text~~ *styles*
    - multiline
      text
    - `inline code`
    - Math: $x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}$

Highlighting

Highlight important text with mark:

<mark>Highlighted text</mark>

Callouts

Use callouts (aka asides, hints, or alerts) to draw attention to notes, tips, and warnings.

Use the > [!NOTE] syntax to create a callout.

> [!NOTE]
> A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

renders as

Note

A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

Or use the warning callout type so your readers don’t miss critical details:

Warning

A Markdown aside is useful for displaying notices, hints, or definitions to your readers.

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Second Brain Markdown
Joyce Ma
Authors
Joyce Ma
PhD Candidate in Strategy

My name is Joyce. My Mandarin name is Heqiao, pronounced “huh-CHEE-ow.” I am a PhD Candidate in Strategy at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

My research lies at the intersection of non-market strategy, entrepreneurship, and innovation. I study how innovative firms and entrepreneurs shape the institutional environment alongside policymakers, how they respond to institutional changes, and how startups and incumbents interact within the innovation ecosystem. My work combines novel data sources with text analysis, machine learning, AI, and causal inference.

Prior to my PhD, I earned a Master’s degree in Economics from Duke University and conducted policy research at a leading think tank in China.

I am on the 2026-2027 academic job market.