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Using an engineering notebook

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Re: Using an engineering notebook

#71

Post by bayindirh »

Pinus wrote: post #67

The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy, half-baked, wrong, turns out to be a false start, whatever. Once all that is fixed, what is left gets tidied up into some sort of digital form, usually program code. I don’t want all that mess in the ca…

> use paper as a data processing medium

I also do the same thing.

> I don’t want all that mess in the capital-N Notebook, but it is hard to know when to switch from backs of envelopes to the Notebook.

On the contrary, I want and enjoy recording my failures, false starts in these notebooks. These are important lessons. A culmination of "what not to do"s, or "Lessons Learnt" in NASA parlance.

My engineering notebooks are my messy garages with working things on the workbench and not working things in a pile at the corner, recording how I think, what I think, and what works / what not.

The code is the distilled version of what's working, the "second" prototype, and the polished product.

Creation is messy, and there's no running away from that. Keeping the mess in its own place allows incubation of nice things and diving back into the same mess to find parts which works beautifully elsewhere.

I prefer to embrace the suck and document it too.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#72

Post by eddyg »

Obsidian with the (core) Daily Notes⁽¹⁾ plugin plus Jump-To-Date⁽²⁾ and Daily Note Navbar⁽³⁾ is a powerful combo for me.

Everything is still searchable (or can be fed into an LLM) since it’s all Markdown text files behind the scenes. (And I can type my thoughts much faster than I can write.)

⁽¹⁾ https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes

⁽²⁾ https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date

⁽³⁾ https://github.com/karstenpedersen/obsidian-daily-note-navba...

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#73

Post by bayindirh »

eddyg wrote: post #72

Obsidian with the (core) Daily Notes⁽¹⁾ plugin plus Jump-To-Date⁽²⁾ and Daily Note Navbar⁽³⁾ is a powerful combo for me. Everything is still searchable (or can be fed into an LLM) since it’s all Markdown text files behind the scenes. (And I can type my thoughts much faster than I can write.) ⁽¹⁾ https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes ⁽²⁾ https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date ⁽³⁾ https://github.co…

Writing with a pen and paper is different from typing on a keyboard at. brain level.

I need to finish that research and write that blog post, apparently.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#74

Post by kasey_junk »

jstanley wrote: post #61
circular_logic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are the things I add in when adding in a new usecase to a codename: - Expansion of the acceptance criteria into small steps. - Any clarifications to what we are making - Anything I don't understand yet so i can chase up someone about it later - As I read through the code I write up possible refactoring opertunties. (I find this a lot better than adding todos as you can skim though the list closer to the end and…

What does it mean to add a usecase to a codename? Is this something you do frequently? And is it something you imagine others also do?

I assume that’s a typo for codebase

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#75

Post by globular-toast »

eddyg wrote: post #72

Obsidian with the (core) Daily Notes⁽¹⁾ plugin plus Jump-To-Date⁽²⁾ and Daily Note Navbar⁽³⁾ is a powerful combo for me. Everything is still searchable (or can be fed into an LLM) since it’s all Markdown text files behind the scenes. (And I can type my thoughts much faster than I can write.) ⁽¹⁾ https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes ⁽²⁾ https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date ⁽³⁾ https://github.co…

Curious to know what you actually do with the notes, though. I've tried to get in the habit of keeping daily journals but it ends up being very much write once, read never. Maybe having some kind of fuzzy, semantic search or LLM would unlock their usefulness, but so far I don't find myself ever really using the things I write down.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#76

Post by Scarblac »

danpalmer wrote: post #17
pjot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it helps to slow down my thoughts and aides deep work. I draw diagrams, connect blurbs with arrows, and “link” to other page numbers.

This is still missing the "what" for me. What do you write down about the work? Is it a plan for what you're about to work on? Is it a breakdown? Is it facts you learn as you work through something? Is it a minute by minute journal of what you've done? Is it just interesting details? Is it to-dos? Is it opinions you're trying to clarify? Diagrams I get, my desk is covered in scribbled diagrams to help me visualise so…

I write down:

- To-do items (with empty checkboxes)

- Notes about what I did, every so often. Or what I talked to someone about, what was decided.

- If I'm programming, I try to have a kind of plan for the next fifteen minutes / hour in a few sentences. "Going to refactor this now." "Updating the state here so it can hold this information." "Adding a component for this". Just so that I do think about what I'm going to do for a bit.

That sort of thing.

Apart from the to-do's the main point is to keep my focus, when I'm writing thoughts on paper I'm not on Hacker News. It doesn't matter all that much what the writing is, to me.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#77

Post by Popeyes »

redjet wrote: post #52
analog31 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a scientist. In the science world, the traditional lab notebook contained a narrative of what you were doing. You're kind of thinking out loud into it. One measure of a good notebook is if it contains sufficient information that you don't have to repeat work only because you can't figure out what you did. There are other good reasons for repeating things of course. My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her…

> There was a time when a notebook was also a legal document This is still the case in certain fields like policing where, in the United Kingdom at least, an officer's pocket notebook is an important document, albeit with some police forces now moving to electronic solutions for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_notebook

Journalists should store their notebooks for 7 years.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#78

Post by crispyambulance »

danpalmer wrote: post #13

I was given this advice at university, but what I was always missing was what I was supposed to write down in them. The post here mentions hypotheses, but I don't do experiments for the most part. It mentions writing down in the notebook before writing code, but I can't test my notes, I can't really send my notes for code review. I guess you could use it for design, but you'd lose all the advantages of word processin…

The practice of using a physical notebook, IMHO, is steadily fading into quaint retro irrelevance for most people in most roles.

I have seen absolutely meticulous lab notebooks before. Each page numbered and dated, cut-outs of graphs taped into the pages, that classy light-green grid-paper. Near flawless penmanship in black ink, with the rare correction crossed out, dated and initialed. Bibliographic references following a strict format in handwriting. Footnotes, FFS.

I've tried, in grad school, 20 years ago to get into the practice. Mine sucked. Non-stop, distracting corrections, maybe a dozen or more per page. Whole swathes of the notebook consisting of deep useless rabbit holes that started with a mis-conception or brain-fart, wasting space, making it a chore to even review what I was doing. I don't think of myself as particularly talented (maybe somewhat better than a fraud). But there are lots of folks like me and much smarter that have the same experience with paper notebooks.

I think really useful notebooks are something that is learned through practice, focus, and mentorship. But there are tools that are much easier to use these days. Notebook-based stuff like jupyter. I like quarto with ipynb myself (though it's not without occasionally infuriating problems).

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#79

Post by binarygit »

JetSetIlly wrote: post #35

This is a timely article for me. I was consulting Joe Decuir's Engineering Notebooks just yesterday and wondered if these sorts of notebooks were a common thing or whether it was just Atari. Joe Decuir was an engineer at Atari and was involved with the development of the 2600. His notebooks can be useful references for the 2600, even to this day. https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977 https://ar…

Looks like even Joe needed some time to adjust using an engineering notebook. He muses about how habits are difficult to change and that it might take him time to adjust to this notebook, and then goes on to wonder why this notebook was assigned and what kind of things he should document here.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#80

Post by MonkeyClub »

Within software engineering circles, the idea of the engineering notebook was reintroduced in Hunt and Thomas' The Pragmatic Programming, where (Topic 22) they call it an "engineering daybook".

Personally, I've been using one form or another of journals and notebooks for over three decades. I did go through the "plain text is king" .txt phase, but, while search is useful, I always revert to a handwritten notebook.

I find that I have a sort of visual memory of the location of a note or scribble, and can sort of easily find my way back to it "in the lower-right side of the page near the end of the notebook".

Another meta-metric that's interesting to access and is lost when typing is the changing quality of my handwriting, and how it exhibits the underlying mental state.

The notebooks/journals started from standard local composition books (B5) to narrower 14x21-ish cheap hardcovers. There's also dates (manual), titles or topic tags (manual), page numbers (manual), cross-references with arrows (which do stand out amongst the handwriting, e.g. -> p. 20, or -> C/20 to xref back to notebook C when you're on notebook E), indexes (also manual), earmarked pages, and a physical bookmark string. I've also reverted back to pencil, which I find more "quiet" a medium - I've been using Faber Castell's sleek TK4600 since elementary school, and it was quite interesting to return to it a couple of decades later.

Plain text is still king nowadays, but it's also diagrammatic, and hyperlinked, the only difference being it is manual, and seems to assist immensely with the memory and personal internal coherence. I can write down a note to myself, working something out, and then return to it a couple of months later, cross-reference it and expand it, gradually reaching new understanding.

No need for slip card boxes when you have a running log of your thoughts and works that can be referenced and cross-referenced, nor is there a need to limit the length of your text because of the medium - write a bullet list if you want, checkbox it, or a 200-word vignette, or just let loose over a few pages, it's all good: a plastic medium for a plastic mind.

In all, for me journaling/notebooking is highly recommended. And for the younger folk who are keyboard-first, perhaps the deliberate slowness and scratchiness of this quaint medium will reveal a meditative quality.

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