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The software engineering notebook

winterflower.github.io

141–143 of 143 posts

Re: The software engineering notebook

#141
post #59
post #23

Earlier 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…

A shudder went through me when I read the parent post you replied to. Based on my personality that wouldn't work for me, and over time I've had to learn to better understand and work better with people that work that way. I've had people comment on me as sloppy, uninterested etc. when they make the observation I'm not a detailed note-taker which is quite frustrating. I've mentored enough colleagues that I've come acr…

One insight that I've come across is the idea that "writing is just thinking on paper". Detail isn't necessarily valuable when it comes to thinking -- it can add noise to the crucial signal. I think the same is true of notes.

I spent my entire education and most of my software career taking few notes, and they did the job well enough. Despite my shift to taking a lot more for various reasons, I agree that there is no moral or strategic value to taking nice notes just for the sake of having done so.

Re: The software engineering notebook

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! This is basically Notes on MacOS, which seems to basically do this (minus infinite undo/redo). I use Notes extensively and it works really well.

Except Apple does not provide a clean way to export notes for archival. I literally stopped using Apple Notes because of the no-export ‘feature.’

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Re: The software engineering notebook

#143

https://gist.github.com is my notebook which has 800+ collections of my own samples and notes along with 800+ stared notes from other developers. It's one thing to keep notes. It's another to have a social network around notes.

that link is a generic one, to an account's own gists. it is not a link to your gists, _except_ for you.
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