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Using an engineering notebook

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Re: Using an engineering notebook

#141

Post by tomjen3 »

analog31 wrote: post #18
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…

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…

>My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her meticulous notebooks. She was telling me just last week that one of her experiments produced a puzzling result. The next day she said: "I figured it out from my notebook. I skipped a step that was in the procedure."

This puzzles me. If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down? And if you're not sure you wrote the exact right steps down, how are you going to use the notebook for that purpose?

What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#142

Post by sevensor »

plopilop wrote: post #82
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…

What I write down is usually a quite literal dump of my brain. I have a problem, and rather than keeping it in my head, I write it down, and force myself to continue writing about the topic to force myself trying to find solutions, rather than be obsessed with the question. Example: "I need to solve problem A. Problem A can be formulated in this way. This way is similar to a project I did a few years ago, if I rememb…

This is my process as well. I find it’s a good way for clearing out bad assumptions. Usually I’ve committed to my first idea, and writing it down gives me space to consider the alternatives. Usually I have a better idea that I haven’t worked out because the first one was lodged in my brain, and once that first idea is out on paper, I don’t have to worry about losing it anymore. The second idea is almost always better.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#143

Post by tomjen3 »

globular-toast wrote: post #75
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.

I use a similar system at work.

Off the top of my head, I have used it to put links together — for example, a Stack Overflow description of some bug, the official documentation, and maybe copying in the exception or the error message.

Then I've sometimes done the same thing when I'm doing ops on a broken system.

Other times it's copying in a specific query or a link to a query in Application Insights.

Other times it's the ticket I was working on, a comment from a coworker, and maybe a few references to either tickets or files. Very rarely is this professional or looks nice. It's just that I need one place where I can put multiple things that fit together.

I find that retrieval does drop off very quickly. But that's just to say most of the value is front loaded. And we should not underestimate the value of being able to answer 'da fuck was I doing yesterday'. Context switching is expensive. But in many ways it is also unavoidable. If you context dump at the end of a workday, it's that much easier to return to it later.

The other thing I do is because the note system I use can I can drop in Hashtags. Yeah, I know. Not exactly HN friendly. What that means is I can find all the times I ran into the same issue, sort of weaving a meta thread through my work. It's really hard to explain, but it's one way of treating notes as not just segments of text.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#144

Post by renato_shira »

pjot wrote: post #16
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…

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.

[flagged]

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#145

Post by gwbas1c »

About a year and a half ago we started writing end-of-day status reports at my job. They include what we did, and what we're going to do the next day.

I started really relying on the "what I'm going to do tomorrow" to remember where I start!

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#146

Post by Traster »

This can be an incredibly powerful tool. It does so many things - it forces you to write down what you're doing. If you actually do that, it's just a great opportunity to think "Hey hang on, is this thing I'm doing actually solving the problem I have" and "Actually is this the most useful thing I could be doing" in an explicit way. Another thing that the author doesn't really mention but actually is really useful for some of us is to go back and read what you've done to (a) not feel like you've been wasting your time doing nothing, and (b) to realise where you were going wrong on this line of reasoning earlier.

Personally I think this is a really useful time to be revisiting the concept because this is how a lot AI tools work. They're language models so the way they get to complexity is through writing out plans step by step and running commands and then interpreting them, you can read your session with an AI agent like claude code as their engineering notebook.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#147

Post by Traster »

psanford wrote: post #111

This "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it. I started keeping a work journal a few years ago and it has changed how I work for the better. It is just a text file. The main value of it is that I can search it! When I'm figuring something out for the first time, and I have a lot of trail and error, I write down what I did. And then I m…

For me the advantage of using digital journalling is it's easier to switch between multiple threads. It means if I have 3 tasks to complete, I can switch tabs to the notes on the new task without thinking about the physical limitations of a notebook.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#148

Post by uncivilized »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #117
uncivilized wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use to digitize your Field Notes? I was using EverNote but I’m looking for an alternative.

Just a flatbed scanner.

Thanks, but I mean do you use OCR or any service after scanning them? Would be nice to be able to search through the notebooks once scanned.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#149

Post by rtpg »

theshrike79 wrote: post #34
rtpg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think generally it's more about sketching the high level structure of the code. I will routinely write things like : documents = ... by_client = documents.group_by(client) for client, doc_set in by_client: for doc in doc_set: csv.write(doc) Not at all following the actual APIs I u…

I've tried that, but my brain is just going "why are you writing about doing the thing instead of, you know, DOING THE THING"? I vastly prefer just making a working skeleton and filling that with actual code as I progress.

Shrug, to be honest if you don't understand the value of sketching out certain problems it's probably because you're not working on anything particularly difficult.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#150

Post by moregrist »

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…

I use a notebook extensively for certain kinds of work and problems. I’ll point out specific ways that I use it to answer your questions.

> The post here mentions hypotheses, but I don't do experiments for the most part.

Debugging any hard bug is essentially making a series of hypotheses and testing them. I use a notebook to keep track and make notes when I’m knee-deep in some hairy bug.

> 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 use a notebook primarily for design work, especially algorithmic design work.

It’s really handy for numerical stuff where I often want to transform some expression or equation and prove to myself that it’s equivalent or has certain properties.

It’s also handy for working through any algorithm where you’re manipulating a tree or a graph.

> I guess you could use it for design, but you'd lose all the advantages of word processing such as editing, links, context, etc.

I find it much faster to sketch the things I mentioned (especially diagrams!) with pen and paper when working through them. If I need to present the work or share it, I might scan the notes or I can polish them in a word processor or slide deck or whatever.

For what it’s worth, my background is in a computational science (not CS) and I do quite a lot of work on numerical and algorithmic problems that come up in actual hardware and sensors. I also like to work on compiler-y things in my spare time.

Ultimately you end up using tools that are useful for you. So none of this may have any value for your work. But hopefully it answers what someone might write in a notebook.

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