Sometimes I wish I could capture the important points in some fashion in order to develop a database of knowledge, if you will, for future reference. I watch a lot of documentaries and presentations. I'd be interested in your thoughts in how you might approach encoding such knowledge into a mind map.
This sort of thing only comes with experience -writing a lot of code and learning from your mistakes. The experienced programmer is at a point where he/she almost intuitively understands which representations might offer an advantage. I find this is a critical difference between a good (and experienced) programmer and a newbie or intermediate programmer. There was a recent HN discussion on data representation as an important element of writing good programs. Algorithms and patterns is what comes to mind. I suppose a map could be used to log and accumulate knowledge on other areas equally important to programming. I think you allude to that in your article when you talk about the mind map exposing you to peripheral entries every time you use it. I just want to point out that there's far more that goes into being a good programmer than being able to navigate documentation quickly. I think you could be onto something here. I am not criticizing your article at all. Not without the algorithmic foundation and experience that a 10x programmer (whatever that is) has to have. In fact, I'll say that this will not make you a 10x programmer, period. With regards to using it to improve programming performance, I think you say near the end of the article that this will not make someone a star overnight. I've had FreeMind installed on one of my systems for probably a year and never really got around to using it.