201–210 of 305 posts
Simple and flexible, cheap sub or free if you host self or on a service like dropbox. Import/export for backup.
Instantly useful out of the box. Many plugins but i havent needed them. Basic search is all I need.
I keep brief notes of the "secret sauce" as I work, eg a list of magic commands, a short outline of function calls, etc.
The benefit of journaling is not just reentry, but that you begin to solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem. Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. Several benefits accrue: you begin to see gaps in the tree, and can fill them in. You begin to have confidence in your mental model, recovering the time you used to spend going o…
Experience looks like intelligence to us because we didn’t see the hours our favorite instructors and mentors spent banging their heads against their own notebooks, haha.
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I write a lot of notes in fact I write more than I read. It helps. However I have some issues: 1. How much commentary should I write? I try to write not too many notes because I write code, and some say code should be self-documenting. So it's the same old question of how many comments should there be along the code. 2. How do I retrieve a note I've written earlier? I can use tags and search for them but it is not ea…
Check out obsidian. It is just folders and markdown so it is ultra portable, but the obsidian editor has tons of useful features like a graph view, autolinking, and a plugin in for anything you can think of. There are tons of YouTube videos and articles describing different organizing systems and ways to use it.
The ideal tool, which I don't think exists, would combine the immediacy and locality of nvAlt and bidirectionally map to something like Jira for sharing, distributed as a browser plugin and/or a simple server component with local write access.
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I’ve been seriously considering using Logseq for this reason. When I first started with Obsidian I used it that way, but the more I put in it the more I started organizing everything. It became less of a journal and more of a repository for long form stuff. I’m thinking about using both just so I have a dedicated tool just for the journaling side of things.
I've been using Logseq as a work journal and it works great. Hashtags help me to track what I need to do and what I've done.
Evey time I've tried essentially journaling for my own sanity I get too bogged down in the way to actually do it. Logseq and Obsidian are often mentione but by the time I've figured out how the hell to use thier obscure syntax (why the hell am I programming, its a journal) I've lost interest. I'd like for there to be an out of the box option, but there doesnt seem to be any. When you bring this up in discussions like…
It took me a few times to land on something I stuck with. At my current job I have a running doc where I just start a new entry per day, at the top and log before I try to do something, and what progress I made that day. What maybe helps is this doc is findable and readable by coworkers and my boss. It is very useful for me, but it's also helpful for others to see what I'm working on without pinging me.
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> solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem. Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. I wrote a program (used from a CLI, but I mostly use the GUI I developed for it) to do something similar for my own use: https://github.com/lelanthran/frame/blob/master/docs/FrameIn... I use it daily.
It's low-tech, but I've been using notebooks (not too thick, stapled usually). I write a header for each day when I start and then a line or two as I work on tasks and I try to note each time I switch tasks. I keep the notebooks but rarely look at them once they are filled. Maybe once or twice as I switch to a new notebook and then once again when it comes to yearly review time. A couple of times I have rifled throug…
append only log works, but skimming through 2 months of logs for a specific thing is poor and slow but very useful. I don't do that often but when i do need it sometimes and especially fast, like on a call, with no lead time. Its a superpower.
I now organize my notebook a with a few conventions that make it more useful.
I limit myself to using only the right side of a page for logs from whole week. Each new week gets a new page, always on the right side. Put the date as the page header. Makes skimming easier. Put any important tasks / targets for the week right after.
Further Split right page into 3 columns. First 2 for work logs, third column for recurring weekly/biweekly meeting stuff. Very easy to go back to what was discussed 2 months ago. All logs are usually 1-3 words. Just cues. but everything has a topic subheader.
Left page is free form for detailed stuff. Things i discover, design, 1:1 meeting notes, questions i need answers to, philosophy, anything new on HN, etc. Right page serves as context.
I also do an index on the first page of the book pointing to anything that i find repeatedly useful. Could do page numbers but i put the date as its naturally ordered by the dates on the right page.
Been doing this a while and works perfect. I have everything I need in one notebook, i can carry it with me. a $1 composition book with 50 pages lasts well over six months.
I keep a stack. Whenever I am interrupted, I push a task onto the stack. When I finish a task, I pop it from the stack. Each task has an associated journal file. Sometimes I reorder the stack.
Similar workflow, except I have 3 lists: TODO, Pending and Done. "TODO" is actionable items. It's a reorderable stack of work I need to do. Same: interruption pushes a task to the stack, when I finish a task I pop it from the stack, etc. So I always know what to do next. "Pending" is an unordered list of things I'm awaiting. Say, I asked someone to do something, and they promised they'd get back to me in a few hours…
I now find that when I have a moment to do something, I pick it off of the TODO list and complete it. Prior to this technique, I did not have a list of this nature and some items never got completed.
I feel incredibly productive with my current setup. However, I don't feel as though my previous system was unproductive and am concerned that I'm "spinning my wheels" by feeling like I need to complete these tasks that went unfinished before.
Have you experienced this? Do you know how to best think about what is optimal?
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Yes! Obsidian with daily note plugin and templates makes it really easy to build a quick list of things and automatically link to yesterday’s notes. A little extra time with templates and some custom js and you can make it a single key combo to copy the notes to paste buffer for sharing in slack standup thread. Also, set up a praise folder and take screenshots every time somebody says something nice about the work yo…
Do you all pay for obsidian? Subscriptions rub me the wrong way for whatever reason and it was enough that I didn't want to pay so I use something else.
I did pay to support their development[1] early on. I've been an obsidian user since early 2020 and I had to roll my own sync solution at the time. At the time I was experimenting with a lot of other PKIM/Note apps and Obsidian was the only one that didn't do proprietary storage format and really honored the "minimal but trivial to extend in powerful ways" philosophy that I value.
> Subscriptions rub me the wrong way for whatever reason
I can understand that. Software development is hard and we are _long_ past the days where software was static. In some ways, I miss buying a computer that didn't expect an internet connection to constantly self-update. On the other hand, though, paying a few bucks a month so make sure the app is updated to take advantage of new OS features and generally keep up with device capabilities is worth it for me.
If there was some 2-5$/month option to support obsidian development I'd consider it. Yes, I know their cheapest sync plan is $4/month but it's only good for 1 gig of data and my biggest vault grows by that much every year or two... hence using SyncThing on a cheap VPS :).
[1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Licenses+and+payment/Catalyst+licen...
I like having a "devlog.md" file for each project/repo. The log is jut a reverse chronological order of comments/todos/rants. I have mapped on VSCode cmd+shift+I to write a timestamp. Whenever I want to write something I just insert a timestamp at the beginning of the bullet-point list and write it out. This is stored alongside the repo. It is particularly useful for recovering in the morning where I was the night be…
Do you commit "devlog.md" to your version control system? If not, how do you sync it between your different computers?
I like having a "devlog.md" file for each project/repo. The log is jut a reverse chronological order of comments/todos/rants. I have mapped on VSCode cmd+shift+I to write a timestamp. Whenever I want to write something I just insert a timestamp at the beginning of the bullet-point list and write it out. This is stored alongside the repo. It is particularly useful for recovering in the morning where I was the night be…
Along the same lines, I also find it useful to have a text log for each sizeable task I undertake. This could contain anything, notes of module structure, code & data snippets for testing, everything! Like one of the top comments mentions, it acts as a node of knowledge within a wider system (graph) and I end up revisiting these logs more often than you would expect! It only gets better as you explore/document more a…
I had no background in C++ or the GIS I was dealing with and this was a one-off thing that was built for a project, but not maintained or documented at all.
The lead eng that wrote the software also had a long and detailed personal log of what he was working on. He just gave me that.
It helped a lot to understand not only how the software worked, but also the design decisions.