I keep all bash history, automatically appending it to a file that’s backed up in google drive. That deals very effectively with remembering how I did something from the command line in the past, which is being mentioned in this thread. However it doesn’t work for commands issued on a machine which isn’t your main personal machine.
The software engineering notebook
131–140 of 143 posts
Re: The software engineering notebook
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I like to separate notes from journaling for precisely this reason. I have hundreds of notes in Evernote that I will never see again. They're invisible, as light on me as a feather. Yet they're also searchable, so they're available in seconds if I ever need them. I have system of using "top" tags to define my working view for a project. Say I'm working on project Foo. At any one time I'll have about half a dozen note…
Nice. I’m going to think about using ad hoc tags like this to tame my monolithic orgmode hierarchy.
Is there not an API in Evernote to query the notes? Seems like getting the last few weeks’ worth, sorting, and dumping to html or pdf would go pretty far for your diary use case.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#133I've been actively looking for a good tool for personal note taking, and finding lots of things that seem not-quite-right. Plain Text: Pros > Simplest, works everywhere/on everything, scales well (append forever!) Cons > Least automated, no images, no math, no code, hyperlinks depend on editor, no embedded files WYSIWYG Doc Editor (Word, Writer, etc): Pros > As easy as plain text, can do images/math/hyperlinks/embedd…
Jupyter is trivial to get up and running. I did it just a couple weeks ago and it took under 5 minutes. There is a docker image but I think I just did "pip install jupyter" and "jupyter notebook".
It does look like they've cleaned up their install instructions since the last time I checked them.
When I tried following their instructions in the past, I was unable to install the kernels I was interested in (Haskell, F#)
Re: The software engineering notebook
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no "todo", only "do" I'm curious about what this means. What are "do" notes (as distinct from "todo" ones). If it means that don't calendar, and you just do that task immediately, how you plan and (more importantly) remember future tasks?
In practice, most people's "todo" list ends up being the garbage bin for low-priority items that they'll never actually do. It's worth separating the things you actually plan to do next week/month, from the ones in a "backlog". Grep any large code repository for "TODO" comments.
As someone who's worked on multiple teams that used TODO comments and then had a regular type of sprint in which they were grepped and cleared (these weren't perfect projects, there were other organisational problems, but this particular thing was handled well), I was actually quite surprised to get into a discussion recently here on HN about projects where this doesn't happen and TODO comments end up being largely aspirational.
However, I think code and life are slightly different contexts here. I get what you mean about separating aspirations from near-term actual intents but I generally use the word "todo" to refer exclusively to the latter (which still doesn't help a whole lot with ensuring execution as the list still grows quite large).
Re: The software engineering notebook
#135For several years I've been using RedNotebook - http://rednotebook.sourceforge.net. I use it mostly to journal what I worked on so that when I need to report it I don't have to struggle to remember anything. Since RedNotebook's text input is directly tied to the date, it works best in my opinion for daily log entries. However, there are shortcuts to jump to the previous/next entry to easily skip days with no log entry. Basic text formatting (txt2tags) is supported along with the ability to export to HTML, Latex, or PDF. It's created in GTK (if that matters), but is supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#136The 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…
I had started a simpler version of your approach a while ago, but how do you manage the overhead if you use it for EVERYTHING?
Re: The software engineering notebook
#137The 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…
How do you find relevant notes from the past? grep (or a fuzzy-match version) would help, or do you organize them by some system? The organization of notes in an accessible manner is a challenge for me - perhaps I'm doing it wromg.
Many notes are easily organized -- when I take notes on books I am reading, for example, there is pretty natural connection to where the not should live (e.g. /education/books/design_of_everyday_things.txt)
Otherwise, since these notes in the context of a project, I can treat it the same way I treat code. So a mix of multi-file search, and directories that correspond to the knowledge in them (e.g. "finances/investing.txt" or "journal/happiness_project.txt", the latter containing any work I do on http://diurnal.st/2013/05/27/training-your-brain-to-be-and-s... -- which I don't do everyday by any means, but that's an example of the kind of thing that exists in my notes)
Re: The software engineering notebook
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same problem as you, but my solution was separating "notes" from future actions. My notes track knowledge, they are referenced as-needed so I store everything because there's low/no cost. I've also found that writing things down improves my recollection, so there's value even if I never reference the note again. My calendar / omnifocus track future actions, I minimize these and keep them very well curated -…
> no "todo", only "do" I'm curious about what this means. What are "do" notes (as distinct from "todo" ones). If it means that don't calendar, and you just do that task immediately, how you plan and (more importantly) remember future tasks?
TODOs are crufty ambiguous notes that often poorly describe the current system and potential future work... and they're so easy to add that the average "todo" is very low-value, dragging down the perceived ROI of fixing any tech debt.
I keep the two separate: good notes describing the state of the world, and a calendar to schedule future actions.
When it comes to software, that means all code must have good documentation and known flaws are scheduled to be fixed. If it's not worth scheduling, it's not worth changing.
My personal life follows the same pattern, although much less formal... there just isn't enough time for every possibility, so I always work backwards from my calendar.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#139The 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…
What is the read-versus-write ratio of your notes? I.e., how often do you actually read the things you write down? PS: Have you ever thought about using a "lifelogging camera" instead? :)
Great question... some files are very read heavy (e.g traits.txt, which is a collection of about 25 traits phrased as imperatives that I aim to accomplish, such as:
"
BUILD QUALITY RELATIONSHIPS - improve existing relationships, and seek out new good ones
MAINTAIN NEUTRALITY - approach things with a beginners mind
PRACTICE SELF-COMPASSION - admit pain, take kind and mindful action ")
Some files are just used a lot for both reading and writing. These include a todo.txt, event_planning.txt for planning logistics of whatever fun getaway or event I'm doing next, a shopping_queue.txt (reduce impulse buys by requiring I put things on that list for some amount of time).
I find that for taking notes on books or presentations, I will write them once, and then refer back to them infrequently -- maybe once a year. A bigger advantage is gained because it makes it easier to stop reading/watching things, because then I can always pick it up again and review the notes associated with it, so I can have a lot of educational threads going at the same time without fear of losing the context.
For journaling, I tend to review my journal and list of activities as a whole a couple of times a year, and typically will review the last week every week or so.
Much of this happens naturally due to the fact that the project is open -- it's often easier and more interesting to review my past work week or pick up where I left off on a book (stored as a pdf within the notes) than it is to jump onto facebook or whatever.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#140The 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…
I think that's a really valuable mental tool. Sometimes past baggage is a hindrance to current goals.
As part of treating my notes as a code project, I even keep them version controlled, which leaves me a little more free to just delete things or "refactor" stuff. A lot of the value I get is going back through things and synthesizing them into clearer and more useful notes. TODOs in particular are dangerous -- I try to treat files of that nature as extensions of my long term memory, rather than a curriculum which I feel obligated to follow.
That being said, there is an element of this project where I feel like a am building a piece of "my life's work". I've built a number of software projects, and part of building them over time and organizing them leaves them in a state where I am proud to have built them -- I can point out a piece of the system, and understand why it works that way, and remember the choices that led to its current state. At one point, I realized that I had no such project for my life, and it was a little weird that I had so clearly documented software systems that were hardly used, whereas my life and action and ideas and knowledge were, for the most part, just in my head. So in a way it's more than the practicality of having notes, although in the practice of it I have found it to be practical. It's a way of adding meaning to the course of my life -- now the ten minutes I spent reading an article can also become a gift to my future self due to the one choice quote I grab from it.