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.
The software engineering notebook
21–30 of 143 posts
Re: The software engineering notebook
#22Where I work, we have an internal R&D wiki in which we describe build processes, tips and tricks, data flows and their diagrams, and so on. It is one of the most valuable tools we have, and the articles steadily increase in quality as we all keep contributing.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#23The commitment to taking good notes has been one of the best decisions of my life -- not just professionally. I use my standard text editor (Textmate 2), and have a "notes" project, with all manner of categories organized by folder. I take notes on articles I have read, take notes on any presentations I watch or educational courses I take, or books I read. Moreover, I now take much better in person notes -- I take th…
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 the baggage that is often turns out to be nothing more than a dead weight. This "lightweight" approach seems to allow me to move forward faster, learn new things that I might have no plans to learn for a long time, because of a queue of other things on my "TODO list". But again, this may be personal.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#24This might seem like over-kill at first, but I've been running the Enterprise version of http://www.xwiki.org on my laptop, and couldn't be happier. Its served up using Jetty, and starts up automatically when I login. I like using tools that I know will scale well in the future, should the need arise (no reason why you couldn't run it on a free Heroku instance, if it handles the load, and it should, as it just idles along most of the time).
It has a Code Macro plugin that supports Pygments syntax highlighting. It all comes down to how you structure the wiki (I often turn to Wikipedia for help with that). I've been an Engineer for 20 years, and the info-flood doesn't really end, unless you dial back your enthusiasm. I like to document the tools and services I discover so that I know what's valuable, and what's out there, should I ever need them.
Once installed, its very easy to create new pages and edit them. Plus there are hundreds of plugins.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#25I have adopted this practice over the last year and have found immense value in the practice. I believe this practice is one of the cheapest ways to help leverage your previous experience on the job as you keep yourself from having to repeat previous learnings over and over again as you try to remember what those compiler flags you used 6 months ago actually were :).
My system is quite simple. I have created a github repo called journal and an alias which opens vim to a markdown file for today's date. If I leave the file and come back later vim will drop me in at the end of the journal. I intend to add some vimscript in the future to automatically add a timestamp when I reopen the file but haven't gotten there yet.
This system has been quite helpful to me as it is resilient to data loss as I can push to multiple backup systems. Easily searchable (grep). And can support prettier documents if I want to open my Markdown formatted journals in tools like Macdown.
TL;DR I use vim to manage this. See alias below.
alias journal='vim + "/Users/username/journal/$(date +%Y)/$(date +%Y%m%d).md"'
Re: The software engineering notebook
#26Is there any opensource things that can be a software engineering notebook or journal that is easy to use and painless?
OneNote works wonders for me.
This. The ability to quickly capture and annotate screenshots and the setup of multiple notebooks makes this my most-used (and most loved) Office application.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
A plain paper notebook. I’ve tried everything and nothing works as well.
This is true and somewhat infuriating. I have a $700 computer in my pocket and the best way to write a grocery list is on a post-it found in the kitchen drawer. I think it comes down to the human interface of a touch screen being slow, frustrating, and generally inefficient.
... and your 700-dollar pocket computer is probably not much better than the 200-dollar one that you ditched a couple of years ago. We buy things not because we need them, but because we want them. (Why we want them is another story.)
Re: The software engineering notebook
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
A plain paper notebook. I’ve tried everything and nothing works as well.
This is true and somewhat infuriating. I have a $700 computer in my pocket and the best way to write a grocery list is on a post-it found in the kitchen drawer. I think it comes down to the human interface of a touch screen being slow, frustrating, and generally inefficient.
It's amazing that we have accepted this user interface for as long as we have. Imagine if touching your paper notebook the wrong way could accidentally erase it or share it with your mom.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#29Back in college, going for my BSEE degree, the professor or lab assistant were constantly stressing the need to record everything done at the bench in a log book with pages dated and signed. Part of this was to keep a history of lab experiments and remind you of what you did and/or learned. Really, however, it was to develop the habit to carry over into your professional career. There are many examples of this but the most important one I remember is the notebook kept by John Bardeen of Bell Labs wherein he recorded the path taken to invent the transistor along with Shockley and Brattain. Not only did it win credit and and patent for its invention, it also won him the Nobel Prize. All because they could conclusively prove their invention along with the when of its discovery.
Re: The software engineering notebook
#30This might seem like over-kill at first, but I've been running the Enterprise version of http://www.xwiki.org on my laptop, and couldn't be happier. Its served up using Jetty, and starts up automatically when I login. I like using tools that I know will scale well in the future, should the need arise (no reason why you couldn't run it on a free Heroku instance, if it handles the load, and it should, as it just idles…
TiddlyWiki is a lightweight, portable wiki option. (I wish it had Vim keybindings, though.) http://tiddlywiki.com/