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Is there any opensource things that can be a software engineering notebook or journal that is easy to use and painless?
A folder of text files. Sounds stupid but I've yet to find a better tool. I'll use Org-Mode if things get more complicated, but nothing beats plain text.
Is there any opensource things that can be a software engineering notebook or journal that is easy to use and painless?
The commitment to taking good notes has been one of the best decisions of my life -- not just professionally. I use my standard text editor (Textmate 2), and have a "notes" project, with all manner of categories organized by folder. I take notes on articles I have read, take notes on any presentations I watch or educational courses I take, or books I read. Moreover, I now take much better in person notes -- I take th…
Can you explain how you organize them? Been trying to do something similar but haven't gotten it quite right yet.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
I keep my own blog entirely for my own benefit, and the tech section is simply things I've read recently, or things I've learned recently:
What's the point? After some time, that would the list of things you forgot... :)
I have adopted this practice over the last year and have found immense value in the practice. I believe this practice is one of the cheapest ways to help leverage your previous experience on the job as you keep yourself from having to repeat previous learnings over and over again as you try to remember what those compiler flags you used 6 months ago actually were :). My system is quite simple. I have created a github…
alias journal='vim + "/Users/username/journal/$(date +%Y)/$(date +%Y%m%d).md" -c "execute \"normal! Go$(date +%T)\========\\" | startinsert "'More importantly though I use my blog for keeping more polished, more elaborate versions of my more relevant notes. Sharing your thoughts with others not only benefits others but it also makes you think over and refine your original ideas.
Distilling your thoughts for the benefit of others will help you better understand the matter as well. While we teach, we learn.
The commitment to taking good notes has been one of the best decisions of my life -- not just professionally. I use my standard text editor (Textmate 2), and have a "notes" project, with all manner of categories organized by folder. I take notes on articles I have read, take notes on any presentations I watch or educational courses I take, or books I read. Moreover, I now take much better in person notes -- I take th…
On the other hand, based on my personal experience, maintaining a constantly growing archive of things, be it notes, bookmarks, emails, etc. turns out to be not very useful. Also, it gradually becomes something that you spend more time on than on other things. I now prefer to be more spontaneous, try to minimize the number of things that drag me into the past, start things as if from scratch, "reset" myself, dismiss…
95% of them go into what I call my "dev diary". Each day gets a new file. Any questions, answers, thoughts, etc. while programming or designing go in there. For searchability, I also add any reference Jira/Trello/etc ids.
Beyond that, I have cheatsheets and checklists. Cheatsheets are short, useful things (e.g. commands, undocumented gotchas, etc.) for a given piece of tech. E.g. I have a git.txt, mysql.txt, etc.
Checklists are things I should go over whenever I do X. Am I about to commit something? Well, there's a list of things I tend to forget to do. So I have a checklist for this.
Each project also gets a file (or folder if it grows large enough) in my notes directory.
I previously used Evernote. Then Onenote because it was nicer on the surface pro. But I had to abandon Onenote because they don't have a good Linux client. I decided I was going to stop throwing my notes away and just switched to regular files.