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

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

#71

Post by martindbp »

mosselman wrote: post #30
js4ever wrote: post #5

Calling a notebook the “most important tool” for a dev is pure romanticism. Useful for some, sure, but let's not pretend it outweighs a debugger, version control, or CI. This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.

Thanks for pointing this out. In the same vein there are so many posts about productivity systems where people put endless amount of time into crafting their gtd notebooks with tabs and lists, etc. All that time spent to be productive instead of actually being productive. Or people describing their ideal Obsidian work flows instead of actually noting anything useful down in it. People writing about how they built the…

You see this everywhere. In sports its the people who spend most of their time worrying about their equipment instead of just playing the game. I was there with learning Chinese as well, spent way more time thinking about tools than actually learning the language.

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

#72

Post by safety1st »

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'…

The sciencey side of this is that writing stuff down boosts memory, retention and learning, even if you immediately throw away what you wrote.

Here's one of the hundreds of articles about this, it's a very well documented phenomenon https://www.newscientist.com/article/2414241-writing-things-...

Writing by hand also has a greater effect than typing because it engages more of the senses and more of the brain, in particular the motor cortex.

I keep telling myself that this would all make a great excuse to get a Moleskine, but handwriting just isn't a part of my workflow. Typing copious amounts of stuff into text buffers and then transforming it is, especially now that we have LLMs. If my brain is totally non-functional I simply start typing barely intelligible phrases into a text editor until it wakes up, then I go back and edit/refactor/clean up, and frequently something comes out of this that looks like a vague outline of an email or piece of code I need to write that day. Or at least a todo list. Then we're off to the races doing actual work. Most of the initial doodling is destroyed.

Handwriting does aid retention though.

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

#74

Post by freetonik »

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 have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful

Same, but I still keep them (both notebooks and random pieces of paper). I find it extremely satisfying to just look into them after many years. It's like looking at random old photos, photos of my thinking process from the past.

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

#75

Post by 2b3a51 »

WalterBright wrote: post #37
bufferoverflow wrote: post #2

I don't understand the pen/physical notebook thing. It's slow to write, insanely slow to search what you've written, almost impossible to copy or share.

If you want to get the most out of a physics lecture, leave the laptop at home. Instead, bring a spiral notebook and some colored pens. Write everything down the prof writes on the blackboard. It's remarkable how much of the lecture you'll remember. And when you read your handwritten notes, you'll remember the lecture that went with it.

Suggestion: Write on the right hand page and leave the left page blank (that's the back of the page if you fold the pages over).

Then go over the notes later and summarise or add details on those left hand pages. I used to do the colour pen/highlighting then.

Worked for me half a century ago. No data format problems or need for legacy hardware either.

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

#76

Post by wiz21c »

xnorswap wrote: post #41
zwnow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a few years of my career now I never had to use a debugger or CI. Console debugging is good enough usually. On version control I agree.

The conclusion I draw from this is that some debuggers are so bad it's not delivering value over "print debugging". But perhaps it's a lack of knowing what a debugger can deliver. A debugger gives you the ability to immediately dive in and instantly inspect the complete stack trace, all the values on the stack, all the values of local variables, etc. Without restarting the program or calling out specifically what you…

A debugger doesn't show you the evolution of your program over time. A few well placed prints give you that.

I use my debugger often, but sometimes you need to track the value of something over time (say, over 1000 iterations) and a debugger can't show you that.

So prints are still relevant. Debugger are more for "needle-in-haystack" stuff I think.

A debugger that could record the execution over time (and query that execution), that would be great. I know there are some, but are there for python for example ?

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

#77

Post by sph »

sixtyj wrote: post #70
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'm sure it's very personal :) Because everyone has their own reality, workflow and reading a piece either resonates or dissonates with you (personally). I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet". On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index sys…

Don’t try to transform a paper notebook into a database. All those organizational tools are elaborate forms of procrastination.

What I do is write notes in the best format for paper: an append-only log with a date on top. Whether digitally or on paper, I rarely if at all need to consult notes from a long time ago, so the log is good enough for most use cases. In fact, as I mentioned elsewhere, writing by hand is not to store data, it’s a way to effectively digest information and incorporate it into your brain. You’ll get a lot of benefit of writing something and immediately throwing it away, so who cares about indexing it for later.

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

#78

Post by sa-tre »

For me, pen/pencil and paper is for throwaway notes when I need to distil an idea down or slow my thinking to focus on something I can't quite reason about in my head fully. It's more of an unloading mechanism that gives me more space to think than my head allows alone. It's not actually something I use for note taking at all, for this I tend to just use OneNote/Obsidian/Confluence (whatever I need to at the time).

I would like to explore using stuff like Zettlekastan note systems with emacs a bit more for actually holding onto a web of knowledge that I refer to. Though this is a different ends, and so requires a different means.

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

#79

Post by wrp »

> I learned very early on in my career that I’m not very good at thinking when I’m at a computer.

Before personal computers, I had the same experience at the typewriter. I find it very inhibiting to have a machine staring me in the face, waiting, while I try to be creative.

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

#80

Post by MrGilbert »

gofreddygo wrote: post #68
MrGilbert wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an analog note taking device (woah!) requires more discipline than a digital one. In the digital world, you can always re-arrange your chaos at almost no cost, whereas you are screwed in the analog world. I'm curious: How do you organize your notes? If you mind to share.

First there's a work notebook and a personal one. both are semi structured, but work one has more structure. first page is always for index, split vertically and you get roughly 80 entries with about 3-4 words each. one for each page that i number as i go writing through the book. index usually has just pointers to days when i get interesting ideas. each right page is for 1 week that i label up top. a small margin is…

> You'll find something else that works for you. Don't overthink this. Just start with a structure and let it evolve.

I'm currently looking at a stack of lovely "Leuchtturm1917" A5 note books. The way I took notes for the last three years has been chaotic, that's why I was interested in your way of doing them. I think, finding a mode of work and let it grow and iterate over time is the way to go. I see room for improvement with regards to how I structure my notes, so that I can find them again - that's what I'm struggeling with in my analog world. So, thanks for your insights, they are really valuable!

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