How to build a second brain as a software developer
aseemthakar.com
How to build a second brain as a software developer
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Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#2Build a second brain to enrich the company you work for?
Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#3Pretty graphs, but I wonder how it stands up to the tests of the real world.
I've personally tried to use mind maps (a bit more general than solving technical problems) but gave up pretty quickly. I think part of the problem was the technology itself, mind map apps are mostly desktop only and the mobile experience navigating a 2D diagram is kind of clunky. The other part was just laziness, after building a mind map for an entire weekend I didn't even scratch the surface of what I wanted to achieve with it.
Also I take objection to the fact that we go straight to Google for solutions, I check the existing codebase I'm working on, code search in my company's internal repo, code search github, then go to Stackoverflow / docs. So there's some amount of intermediate caching.
Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#4Build a second brain to enrich the company you work for?
I built one enrich myself and to make my life easier, but I have little doubt my employer has benefited from it. I don't mind that form of "trickle up" economics.
Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#5Pretty graphs, but I wonder how it stands up to the tests of the real world. I've personally tried to use mind maps (a bit more general than solving technical problems) but gave up pretty quickly. I think part of the problem was the technology itself, mind map apps are mostly desktop only and the mobile experience navigating a 2D diagram is kind of clunky. The other part was just laziness, after building a mind map f…
After a few goes at it, I've mostly settled into using mind maps as a brainstorming / thought organizing construct and I transcribe the useful results to plain text for longer term search and storage.
Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#6It sounds like a lot of work and overhead for something that nine times out of ten I'll only need once and if I need it again, I'll default to Google anyway.
What good is doing all this filing and organizing if it only serves you personally? It's like building and maintaining a cache, but with a high percentage of cache misses.
Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#7Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#8tl;dr make a habit of systematically documenting. Use a good tool such as Roam Research (I use it and recommend)
Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#9This seems too heavyweight to me, specifically step 3 with all the data structures and templates. There's just no way capturing all that metadata is going to pay off for me. I see it as:
1) define your basic structure for capture (I also like PARA[1])
2) invest in the tools (for me, emacs/org-mode combined with the BrainTool browser extension - disclosure I built it[2])
3) understand your inflows and workflow.
4) just use search on your second brain for retrieval.
[1] https://fortelabs.co/blog/para/
[2] https://braintool.org/2021/05/15/Organizing-your-life-with-a...
Re: How to build a second brain as a software developer
#10Build a second brain to enrich the company you work for?
It’s often called “Confluence” (or something like that.)
(No, I don’t love it. It’s just what’s there.)
The supermarket analogy glosses over the fact that supermarkets are designed to be accessible to many people. Documenting what everyone needs to know because you needed it for yourself anyway is a great way to make teams happy with you. Plus you get to demand the attention to ask lots of detailed questions “for our documentation” and often encounter and surface issues with internal processes.