Encyclopedia — A Structured CS Knowledge Base

Overview

Encyclopedia is a personal project to build a structured, cross-linked knowledge base of computer-science and software-engineering topics. The interesting part is not the volume of text but the structure: every piece of knowledge is a node with a defined shape, a place in a hierarchy, and explicit prerequisites, so the whole thing can be validated and navigated like a graph instead of being a pile of notes.

It is early-stage and I want to be clear about that. The design documents and the tooling are the finished part. The content is machine-generated and not yet reviewed line by line, so it should be read as a draft corpus, not authoritative reference material. The project isn't published as a public repository yet.

What's There

• Node file format: YAML frontmatter (id, kind, parent_id, title, difficulty, tags, optional prerequisites and related_to) followed by a fixed ten-section body — overview, explanation, real example, key takeaway, related concepts, quiz, interview questions, code example, references
• Six-level hierarchy: Subject → Unit → Topic → Subtopic → Concept → Lesson, with parentage defined by parent_id rather than folder placement
• Validation spec: 13 rules covering ID format and uniqueness, reference resolution, circular prerequisites, allowed values, body section order, minimum quiz and interview-question counts, and in-body link integrity
• Scaffolding: 57 subject folders spanning programming fundamentals to AI/agenticagenticDescribes AI systems that plan and take multi-step actions — calling tools, reading the results, deciding what to do next — rather than producing a single reply. engineering and interview preparation
• Generation scripts: Python and Node scripts that emit node files and print directory trees
• Reader app: a small Next.js 16 site with subject pages and lesson pages that render GitHub-flavoured markdown, list a node's children as "next in this path", and read content from disk

Design Documents

Seven short docs describe the hierarchy, file format, validation rules, architecture (source of truth and layers), planned tech stack, tracking metrics and a week-by-week workflow. They are written so that a validator and a database import can be built straight from them.

Tech Stack

Reader: Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, react-markdown, remark-gfm

Tooling: Python and Node.js scripts for generation

Status

The validator described in the spec is not built yet; that is the next step before expanding any subject's content. I'd rather finish the validator and review a single subject end to end than keep generating.