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Using an engineering notebook

ntietz.com

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Re: Using an engineering notebook

#111

Post by psanford »

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 might not touch that thing again for 6 months. When I come back to it, it is unlikely that I will remember what I did exactly but because it is written down and searchable I can quickly recover my old state.

I like this so much I also started a personal work journal for my home lab. It really is useful for me. But its primary value is that I can search it.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#112

Post by eddyg »

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.

For me it's mostly about being able to find stuff. For example, I save links (with some notes) that I've seen that day, and weeks/months later I'll remember "I read an article about $THING" or "I saw a repo that was similar to $THING" and I'll be able to find it.

Omnisearch is really good: https://publish.obsidian.md/omnisearch

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#113

Post by recvonline »

reeeeee wrote: post #110
recvonline wrote: post #109

Based on this thread, I decided to implement my best take on an online engineering notebook: https://about.workledger.org/ All local first. Happy to get some contributors :)

Did you one-shot this using an AI coding agent? If this was really just now created after reading this article and the comments, it's incredibly impressive.

Let's say.... 10 shot with Claude Code :) Initial app, then hand refined, Claude Code again...back and forth. Spend my morning doing it and it was fun. Very simple so far, want to clean it up and add more meaningful features.

EDIT: Also, turns out the in-browser Editor landscape got GOOD the last few years apparently. It's really just plug and play. I remember 5 years I tried to do this and it was painful.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#114

Post by Linux-Fan »

0x696C6961 wrote: post #66

I usually have a long running note per-project and whenever I need to context switch, I add a "Next Step: ..." line at the bottom of the doc. So I can jump right back in when I come back.

This is a powerful technique that has helped me a lot in the past as well, especially for those projects where I rarely progressed on (mostly private stuff, the work topics are more streamlined).

Nowdays in my private projects I often use a combination of the git commit messages and comments left in the code to indicate where to continue. Of course, this is not useful for work, either.

For work I like to use the ticket system and a separate text file and a paper notebook each to a slightly different effect.

The text file is the log what was done and is done per day grouped by ticket, typically ~10 lines for a day. The notebook contains meeting notes, design thoughts, general notes etc. and is very verbose (often six or mor pages per day, A4 paper) but sometimes helps to identify how/why/when a given decision was taken. The ticket contains what might also benefit others such as technical insights, meeting summaries (derived and summarized after the meeting from the paper notebook), summaries of important (design or product) decisions etc.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#115

Post by speedbird »

This was definitely something I picked up from science education. Basically a technical journal.

These days I split between technical notes a write and store on the project git so others and the AI tools can read - eg architecture decision records, bug reports etc and then a separate personal linear time journal of what I’m doing / thinking/ task lists meeting notes etc, often with links to the project specific docs. Great for searching. What I miss from paper is ability to quickly sketch diagrams.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#116

Post by sota_pop »

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…

I feel I could write a long response to every comment in this thread as notekeeping is something I consider critical. Knowing when to commit to “The capital-N Notebook” is something I’ve struggled with as well. What has been effective for me is to scribble daily on a marker/chalk/dry erase board and then transpose the final thought into “The Notebook” at the end of each day. This lets me format, err, mull, etc. and the final (sic clean) notebook still has enough granularity to retrace my thoughts in the med-to-long term.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#117

Post by JKCalhoun »

uncivilized wrote: post #105
JKCalhoun wrote: post #92

I've done this continually—initially writing in spiral notebooks—since I started writing computer games 40 years ago. When at Apple, where it is probably widely known that there is an internal bug-tracking system called "Radar", a co-worker called my notebook style "John-dar" since I kept copious one-line to-do lists of issues still to resolve, tasks to tackle, etc. When all the circles next to each entry were filled…

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

Just a flatbed scanner.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#118

Post by helterskelter »

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…

Writing things by hand leads to better retention, but if you can't remember it...yeah you'll have a fun time finding it again if you have a nontrivial amount of notes and haven't spent a significant amount of time indexing them.

I guess you could OCR them. Best of both worlds.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#119

Post by scottLobster »

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…

I find there's an advantage to writing if I'm trying to memorize something. But if that isn't going to happen because I only did this configuration once and then never needed to reference it again for two years and now I need the exact commands I executed, can't beat a searchable txt file.

Re: Using an engineering notebook

#120

Post by TripleTree »

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…

it sounds like the author is using an e-ink device for note-taking. i use an ipad app for a lot of hand-written notes and i'm consistently surprised at how well it can search my chicken-scratch.

my biggest issue with handwriting is it just takes so long that i end up leaving out important details. it's a shame because i do enjoy it.

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