Ask HN: How do you manage your personal software projects? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your personal software projects?

#61

Post by nbadg » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 7:08 PM UTC

thr0waway1239 wrote: post #56

nbadg wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an aside, I really wish there were something that really, truly duplicated the experience of pen and paper, but were digitally indexable and searchable. There's just something really special about the tactile feedback. I also really like the way I can bounce between two arbitrary pages extremely rapidly with a physical notebook, or even look at two at once. Plus, depending on how well you remember what, rapidly se…

Maybe you know about the LiveScribe SmartPen: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00524DLZ0/ This was a really nice product, until the company decided to go for the "smartphone app" experience and changed everything about it drastically. I sought out and bought the older version (the second gen) because it actually had all the features I expected. The concept is out there, but with the following improvements you can g…

Stuff like the LiveScribe is close, but not quite, what I want. I think at the moment one of the most likely candidates is actually something with AR. Plus, it would just be really stupendously cool to have a blank notebook that is "full" of AR writing.

Talk about invisible ink.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your personal software projects?

#62

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:37 PM UTC

nbadg wrote: post #60

blcArmadillo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While reading your comment I was reminded of this method [1] I saw awhile back of having an index in the back of a notebook and marking the edge of pages at the point of the corresponding index item. It's an interesting concept if you don't need a ton of granularity in your ability to search. [1] http://www.highfivehq.com

That's super clever too. Man, my notebook game is getting so much better today.

I also use a set of colored posit "pointers" that I tag pages with, red for action items, blue for web site ideas, green for the current project and yellow for possibly patentable Ideas

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your personal software projects?

#63

Post by dragonshed » Wed, Sep 21, 2016, 9:51 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #14

I use a notebook. One that I write in using a pen. When stopping for the evening/day/whatever I take 5 - 10 minutes to write in my notebook what part of the project is working, what has been changed, open questions, and a list of three things to do next. You can think of it like having a standup meeting with myself :-). When I go back to the project, I thumb back through the pages in my notebook until I find the last…

A suggestion to improve upon the user experience of navigating a notebook: http://www.highfivehq.com/#method

The doubly linked list approach might be more useful if entries aren't naturally in chronological order, or if it's more of a graph than a list :)

I also primarily use pen & paper for most things, but even with log entries (as well as simple bullet-journal structures), I struggle to effectively manage projects. I was hoping for more detail on the structures used by others.