Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

hamatti.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 302 posts

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#251

Post by ArthurStacks »

subjectsigma wrote: post #92
cheema33 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Great blogpost to advertise yourself to potential employers that youre completely useless Is it really that difficult to imagine that what does not work for you might work for someone else?

Empathy is in short supply these days but especially on HN. Very strange to watch adult humans fail at basic theory of mind tests such as understanding that other people can have their own preferences

Being useless isnt a preference

In my company if an engineer came out with this nonsense he would be placed on my special system of making his role so unpleasant to the extent that he leaves

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#252

Post by wglb »

hinkley wrote: post #192
ednite wrote: post #118

Great discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall. For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actua…

I wonder how many developers today were forced to take an introductory drafting class. I know a lot of us played with Lego. The problem of describing a 3 dimensional object in two dimensions requires extra projections to describe the thing. A 3d object in 2 dimensions takes three drawings to mostly describe. If the object is more complex than three dimensions, you need to look at it from a lot more angles.

I had a drafting class as a freshman in engineering school. The professor would come to class with a piece of chalk and a string and proceed to us only these tools to construct complex three dimensional shapes, and show how to rotate them to give a different view.

One small example of a problem we were required to learn was that of a pipe running through a space at some angle and determine if it intersected something important.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#254

Post by esperent »

sky2224 wrote: post #25

Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away. I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful. If there's something worth noting down, then it goes into documentation, so others can stumble upon whatever quirk I've come across in the future. If there'…

Reminds me of the old joke: all you need to be a philosopher is pen and paper. All you need to be a mathematician is pen, paper, and a trash bin.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#255

Post by CommenterPerson »

Aside, as a SQL data analyst working with undocumented or poorly documented dbs and business processes .. notes are a lifesaver. Important / obscure details are easily forgotten. I used to use paper but confess to now using OneNote (hate it and hate MS, but it works).

The other place where typed up notes are extremely useful is with business users and meetings that go back and forth ending in confusion. A shared screen with minimal notes that the requester sees (and agrees) works wonders in bringing focus.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#256

Post by hxtk »

tmaly wrote: post #223
sky2224 wrote: post #25

Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away. I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful. If there's something worth noting down, then it goes into documentation, so others can stumble upon whatever quirk I've come across in the future. If there'…

I use to just lose my notes. But I have been using tech to transcribe them and put the text into my Obsidian vault. I am thinking about trying to do something with this like scanning for connections between notes or adding some tags to make ideas easier to find.

> I use to just lose my notes.

I used to do this very intentionally. In the past, I've found that taking notes is very valuable for me, but having notes seldom is.

When I was in school, I would write all my notes on a dry erase board and simply erase it when I had filled up the page. That was when I was studying things that were already known, though, so it was viable to, for reference material, just become skilled at referencing pre-existing reference material.

Now that I'm a professional and often working on something new or combining things in a new way, it's more often useful to me to generate new reference content for myself and especially for a different person who picks up the task on my day off.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#257

Post by kapitar »

ednite wrote: post #118

Great discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall. For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actua…

This is why (apart from being Irish) I drink a fair bit of tea throughout the day.

Going to the kitchen, boiling water and letting it brew, gets me away from my desk and gives me an opportunity to start thinking out loud while I wait.

Sometimes just getting up out of my chair will shake loose some tough problem and the answer will be clear.

Alas, even after all these years, I occasionally grind away on things rather than remembering this.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#258

Post by ddaud »

Jtsummers wrote: post #144
rubicon33 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This 100%. I was going to write something similar. In my entire 15 years in software engineering, the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison to the amount of times I've relied on version control or a debugger. Has a notebook or a whiteboard been handy at times? Of course. But the rubber meets the road behind the IDE, and the tooling there is the story of the day.

> the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison to the amount of times I've relied on version control or a debugger. In my now ~35 years of programming, I've found reaching for the notebook often saves me from needing to rely on a debugger unless it's code I inherited and didn't write myself. Even then, though, mapping it out on paper and using my pseudocode-shorthand to describe what the progra…

This is exactly my thought. Be it pen and paper or digital, writing out what your software needs to do and how it will do it saves an immense amount of time debugging or throwing things at the wall. I’m shocked at some of the responses here; there is a qualitative difference in the development experience when you spend the time designing (I also frequently do this by hand, but it doesn’t have to be) before implementing anything vs. opening an IDE and hammering something out.

I’d go further to say that software development isn’t about writing code, it’s about designing and understanding programs. Code is an implementation detail, the understanding is what is crucial.

Re: As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

#259

Post by brailsafe »

cleak wrote: post #149
ednite wrote: post #118

Great discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall. For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actua…

The book Smarter Faster Better introduced me to the concept of disfluency - the idea that extra friction such as awkward fonts, new environments, different tools, etc will pull you out of autopilot mode and force you to think in new ways. I haven’t seen references to it elsewhere, but it’s changed how I approach problems and learning the last 9 years. Switching to a notebook is one great way I use to trigger this as…

This is a somewhat wasteful one, but when I really really can't focus or make progress on untangling an issue or if I just want to fully understand a file, I will print out my code on paper and go through it with a red pen line by line. It's rare, but it works just like editing an essay. I notice things I wouldn't otherwise.
Post reply on HN