The software engineering notebook

357 点作者 Winterflow3r超过 7 年前

43 条评论

goo超过 7 年前

The 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 them into "scratchpads" and then synthesize them later.It's indispensable in meetings because I both take notes about the goals of meetings beforehand, take note of any important parts during them, and am able to succinctly review them afterwards as they relate to the original goals, and easily keep track of any action items.I manage EVERYTHING this way now-- what I am currently working on, notes about what I've done in a day, notes about what I've done on the weekend, notes about books I want to read, movies I want to watch, have watched, fitness routines. It goes on.At first it was a small but useful knowledge base, and a good plan for how to keep track of things better. Now it's a larger, and even more useful knowledge base, where due to review and organization the important concepts in it have mostly made its way into my long term memory. And the process of taking and using the notes has become a smooth and well-honed process. I keep the notes in dropbox so I have easy access to them on mobile also.In short: I treat my personal knowledge base as if it were a coding project: using well organized text files. I am constantly adding to them and maintaining them. It is working very well for me.

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rocketcity超过 7 年前

I 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"'

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atmosx超过 7 年前

For engineers, I found this logbook guide which seems perfect[1]. I found this on the desk of my new job, about 1 month ago. Someone left it there and it intrigued me. I'm trying to abide to it, not religiously, but so far so good. Others might find it helpful.[1] <a href="http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/mindworks/Capstone%20Design/Project%20Guides/Logbook_Handout.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/mindworks/Capstone%20Design/P...</a>

sbov超过 7 年前

I have a "notes" directory in dropbox. I use .md files, with a text editor that does some highlighting based upon the markdown.95% of them go into what I call my "dev diary". Each day gets a new file. Any questions, answers, thoughts, etc. while programming or designing go in there. For searchability, I also add any reference Jira/Trello/etc ids.Beyond that, I have cheatsheets and checklists. Cheatsheets are short, useful things (e.g. commands, undocumented gotchas, etc.) for a given piece of tech. E.g. I have a git.txt, mysql.txt, etc.Checklists are things I should go over whenever I do X. Am I about to commit something? Well, there's a list of things I tend to forget to do. So I have a checklist for this.Each project also gets a file (or folder if it grows large enough) in my notes directory.I previously used Evernote. Then Onenote because it was nicer on the surface pro. But I had to abandon Onenote because they don't have a good Linux client. I decided I was going to stop throwing my notes away and just switched to regular files.

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dageshi超过 7 年前

<a href="http://tiddlywiki.com/" rel="nofollow">http://tiddlywiki.com/</a>Sits in a browser tab, insanely quick to use which is the most important thing.Consider it perfect for taking notes.I use seperate systems for todo and project management (the project management one I wrote myself)

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richdougherty超过 7 年前

My first notebook entry is a file called 2011-01-20.txt. I just opened it and had a look what I was doing on that day - really interesting!These files have useful commands, todo lists, debugging notes, stack traces, useful links.Don't overcomplicate things - just make a text file each day and dump everything in. Don't bother too much with structure or tidiness. If you need info from the previous day, just copy it across.Once you've got enough stuff in your notebooks to be valuable do remember to get an automated backup going.

Xeoncross超过 7 年前

<a href="https://gist.github.com" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com</a> 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.

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sizzzzlerz超过 7 年前

Back 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.

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barrkel超过 7 年前

I knew what I wanted in a digital notebook, so I spent an afternoon writing one. This:* no explicit saving or loading, everything automatically persisted as plain text* infinite persistent undo / replay of text entry, for retracing steps; can double as work logging; this uses a log file alongside the plain text; this also lets text be deleted without being lost, which helps with clutter* "most recently edited first" page order, so you can forget about those old pages* minimal ceremony to create a new page; use the first line as the title* quick searching and navigation in time and space, using keyboard<a href="https://github.com/barrkel/scratch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/barrkel/scratch</a>

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seltzered_超过 7 年前

When I started my first 'engineering' job at a chip startup over a decade ago, I remember being given a leather blue notebook with gold lettering titled 'ENGINEERING NOTEBOOK'. It was great for focusing on a single project and especially made sense for areas beyond code like drawing electrical schematics, but over time I've become addicted to digital approaches.These days? I rely heavily on Trello for personal projects - organize things by keeping a separate Done board (list for every month) for the project for times I want to flip back through older work done. Also keep paper notebooks around for times when I want to sketch ideas out.Additionally there's a 'rhizomatic frankenstack' of nvAlt+simplenote / pinboard / markdown files in project folders etc. I keep wanting to set up something where it's all searchable and ideally dream of something like federated wiki with a lot more UI polish.[1]: term from Venkat Rao's post <a href="http://mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/frankenstacks-and-rhizomes?e=9621d0c003" rel="nofollow">http://mailchi.mp/ribbonfarm/frankenstacks-and-rhizomes?e=96...</a>

quantumhobbit超过 7 年前

I keep a notebook partially to help myself but also to protect myself James Comey style. It really comes in handy when non-coding managers ask what I do all day or when they try to gaslight me on my commitments.And yes, I am looking for a new job.

rayascott超过 7 年前

This might seem like over-kill at first, but I've been running the Enterprise version of <a href="http://www.xwiki.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.xwiki.org</a> 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.

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xor1超过 7 年前

Quiver is the closest thing I've found to what I consider my perfect note-taking software. I think getting any closer would involve writing my own at this point, and that's simply not going to happen.

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lkrubner超过 7 年前

Maybe this is just changing fashion, but a lot of developers keep blogs for this reason, and 10 years ago everyone would have simply called this idea a "blog". Among the ones I read:<a href="http://intertwingly.net/blog/" rel="nofollow">http://intertwingly.net/blog/</a><a href="https://burningbird.net/" rel="nofollow">https://burningbird.net/</a><a href="https://kottke.org/" rel="nofollow">https://kottke.org/</a><a href="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/</a>I keep my own blog entirely for my own benefit, and the tech section is simply things I've read recently, or things I've learned recently:<a href="http://www.smashcompany.com/technology" rel="nofollow">http://www.smashcompany.com/technology</a>

shams93超过 7 年前

Usually they're work specific notes for my coworkers, its always nice to share a line by line account of your build process when you're using some arcane systems that require being built from source with really complex configuration issues to handle.

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BjoernKW超过 7 年前

While I don't keep a software development notebook as a rigorous practice I note down interesting or useful insights, findings and patterns in Evernote. I sometimes keep code snippets as GitHub Gists but usually I find source code to be too transient and dynamic to keep it anywhere else than in the actual project it's needed in.More importantly though I use my blog for keeping more polished, more elaborate versions of my more relevant notes. Sharing your thoughts with others not only benefits others but it also makes you think over and refine your original ideas.Distilling your thoughts for the benefit of others will help you better understand the matter as well. While we teach, we learn.

bloaf超过 7 年前

I've been actively looking for a good tool for personal note taking, and finding lots of things that seem not-quite-right.Plain Text:Pros > Simplest, works everywhere/on everything, scales well (append forever!)Cons > Least automated, no images, no math, no code, hyperlinks depend on editor, no embedded filesWYSIWYG Doc Editor (Word, Writer, etc):Pros > As easy as plain text, can do images/math/hyperlinks/embedded files, somewhat portableCons > Bad at code, not many automated features, unwieldy once file gets largeMarkup language tool (Org-Mode, Wikis, etc):Pros > Powerful, portable, good at code/links, scales well, highly configurable, highly scaleableCons > Have to learn the markup language, mostly bad at math, high up-front costs (e.g. needing to set up a server or learn alien keyboard shortcuts), non-wysiwyg feels less like a "quick note" and more like a professional document, image/doc embedding can be hit or missNote-taking app (Onenote, Evernote, etc):Pros > Automates lots of note-taking tasks (e.g. time stamping/tagging), can do images/math*/hyperlinks/embedded files, scales... fairly wellCons > Least portable (dependent on app-specific sync features which may change), less simple (best use of notebook features are non-obvious), still bad at codeElectronic lab notebooks (ELNs) (labfolder, benchling, etc):Pros > Good for organizing/presenting data, embedding files, scale very well, have collaboration featuresCons > Very not-simple (most require either require server config, or you don't own your data), most are somehow still bad at math/code, frequently expensive and not portableTask Managers / To-do lists (Trello, Asana, etc):Pros > Very intuitive to use, can sort of embed documents/images, have collab featuresCons > Not good for longer-form notes, bad at math, not meant for note-taking, you mostly don't own your dataOthers:Jupyter/Mathematica can do WYSIWYG text, code, math, data, and images all in one document. However, Mathematica is expensive, and Jupyter is non-trivial to get up and running. These tools are primarily geared towards creating a polished document, and are less good at documenting the evolution of ideas inherent in note-taking.Personal Diary/Journal software is mostly underwhelming, most of these seem like cut-down note-taking apps sold to the non-tech-savvy

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gglitch超过 7 年前

Someone should make a database of every HN comment on the best ways to manage notes and/or tasks. I might even buy a subscription.Edit: My current stack, to show good faith: paper for log and tasks, Org and Git for memoranda.

mumonz超过 7 年前

I have a small website in the wild. Every page is a markdown file with notes and ideas about a subject. The entire website is git versioned. I keep a copy of the git repo on Dropbox to easily edit articles and push to upstream (that is the place where the website is hosted). Ah... there is an sqlite file with a single table with the following cols: article-name, file-path, creation-date, tags (for search by argument). Article last edit time is taken directly by the file. Every meta-info is shown on top of the html rendered markdown file (i use Parsedown)

canadianhacker超过 7 年前

I like these types of discussions.For me, note-taking is something which helps me digest complex ideas. It's a valuable thing and something you can improve at with time.Then I read the reasoning behind why others don't take notes and I stop to think. Hmm, maybe there is such a thing as too much. Maybe note-taking has a fine balance. Breaking up complexity and summarizing it with notes can be very helpful with getting something finished. Writing journals of everything you do daily probably detracts time from actually performing the tasks required.There's some science out there on how dopamine gets released when we TALK about performing an action with desirable results. (I'm going to create this project, I'm going to workout this summer and lose weight, I'm going to read 12 books this year). Basically, you're being rewarded for not doing but just saying. If you spend too much time note-taking on a plan or project, you might be getting the dopamine fix, which might make it harder to execute.Similar comparisons are with startups and large companies. Startups work fast and can ship products quicker, at the cost of maintainability. Large companies have to take their time documenting, grabbing requirements, assigning the team, and following internal processes. The process kills productivity, in favor of predictability and maintainability.

pjmorris超过 7 年前

In Dropbox, I keep an annual logbook file for both work and home, just a text file (well, rtf). As I do things that I want to remember I did, I write a note, paste a command line or link, etc, under a line with the date on which I did/wrote/pasted. Over time I've built up a record of my activities, and a handy notebook for remembering how to do complicated things I seldom do. It also makes it easy to write up status reports when those are necessary.

mbrock超过 7 年前

I've noticed that discussing and chatting are way more productive forms of writing for me, and I've realized that it's exactly because they discourage excessive editing.So after thinking about it for a while, I realized that the best way for me to take notes is just to have a chat room with myself, where I write things down as I do stuff or think about stuff.The common pattern is that I start the day by writing something about what I want to do, how I plan to spend the day, maybe some reflections on how I feel about the project's direction... Then during the day I'll put some brief notes, including random ideas that I just want to get out of me... And then at the end of my workday I'll go and reflect what I did and the current status.Then I also have a setup of Org mode documents. One is a general project management file for all the projects in my life (housing, volunteering, work, recipes, etc) and then there are notes files that are more like sprawling personal wikis or (more pretentiously) like very disorganized book drafts where I flesh out my thoughts in a more long term way or in depth way.(About the self-chat, I also use that for writing things like blog posts; I make a first draft just by chatting, and then I spend hours reorganizing and editing.)

d08ble超过 7 年前

I'm using LiveComment structured notes for everything. I developed a methodology how to use it across multiple operation systems & technologies. LiveComment extend my memory & speedup developing source code. It has powerful server/client plugins system for add any function in runtime with live reload. I'm using paper & board for brainstorm too.<a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment</a>Samples here:<a href="http://acpul.org/livecomment-src" rel="nofollow">http://acpul.org/livecomment-src</a> - livecomment js sources (it's quine, that developed using self documented code)<a href="http://acpul.org/pool" rel="nofollow">http://acpul.org/pool</a> - common memory pool: active info, some processed bookmarks from HN, reddit, etc.<a href="http://acpul.org/pica" rel="nofollow">http://acpul.org/pica</a> - livecomment in real project. here is collected info when i was develop gpu optimizations for popular nodejs image resizing library <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/pica" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/pica</a>

mark_l_watson超过 7 年前

When I got my first full time job as a programmer in the 1970s, my boss handed me a new square deal grid bound notebook and told me to write down everything I did. It was my secret weapon: years after working on something, I could do a quick refresh if questions arose.I still keep copious notes every workday of everything; e.g., hyper parameters for modeling, server info, URIs to useful documentation, etc.

jpeeler超过 7 年前

For several years I've been using RedNotebook - <a href="http://rednotebook.sourceforge.net" rel="nofollow">http://rednotebook.sourceforge.net</a>. I use it mostly to journal what I worked on so that when I need to report it I don't have to struggle to remember anything. Since RedNotebook's text input is directly tied to the date, it works best in my opinion for daily log entries. However, there are shortcuts to jump to the previous/next entry to easily skip days with no log entry. Basic text formatting (txt2tags) is supported along with the ability to export to HTML, Latex, or PDF. It's created in GTK (if that matters), but is supported on Linux, Windows, and Mac.

RangerScience超过 7 年前

Professionally - I took over the monthly payment system at my current job. There was a fair amount of technical debt and tribal knowledge about the thing - the first few months, I took extensive notes about everything from basic usage to problems encountered. As I paid off the technical debt, however, I was able to gradually turn the notes into code; now, it's almost at the point where there's nothing to write down each month (although there's usually new code to write).Outside of that, a friend of mine has made his own semi-public wiki, and tied that into his email client; he can now easily link to pages from within the email, allowing him to communicate A LOT with very few new words. It's pretty neat.

baron816超过 7 年前

Here is my software engineering notebook (still a work in progress): <a href="https://baron816.gitbooks.io/good-stuff-to-know/content/" rel="nofollow">https://baron816.gitbooks.io/good-stuff-to-know/content/</a>Working on this has definitely helped me learn these concepts much better and deeper, plus it's easy to go back and find things when I need them. Just reading something is not a good way to absorb information. Actually having to regurgitate something in your own words makes a huge difference.Gitbook is not the best place for all my notes. Will be using Evernote going forward.

crehn超过 7 年前

I have a "things learned" section in Notes.app, mostly to avoid repeated fuckups and to become a better person. Some earlier example entries:* Leave the office once you're really sure that deployment was successful* Have timestamps in logs* Before making your opinion public, make sure what you think is a mistake is in fact a mistake* When you struggle with an issue, make sure the fix isn't right in front of you* Make sure everything's set up for remote work; you don't want to hotfix some production issue at 2 AM, only to find out you can't access Git from home* Other people's time is worth twice yours

jkmcf超过 7 年前

For me, celerity of access makes my note taking possible. Mouse over a hot zone and the editor slides out. Mouse away, and it hides.I used to use SideNote, but that was abandoned. I'm currently using SideWriter, but it's a little flaky.I hope to start learning swift soon so I can develop my own with some extra features, mainly markdown and either tabs/multiple hot zones.My memory is horrible, so I need to write down what I did/thought before it vanishes. Mostly comes in handy when I have to justify to HR why they need to give me a raise.

baldfat超过 7 年前

I currently use Boost and I like it, but I miss the old PIMs of the early 00s. I keep wanting to make my own old school pim as a pet project but that always stays in the back. It would be ncurses based :)I started with old wikis and then a Russian PIM that I can't remember and then Google Notebook. Evernote was always a hit o miss the sync never was good for me.

Myrmornis超过 7 年前

I keep all bash history, automatically appending it to a file that’s backed up in google drive. That deals very effectively with remembering how I did something from the command line in the past, which is being mentioned in this thread. However it doesn’t work for commands issued on a machine which isn’t your main personal machine.

forkLding超过 7 年前

Is there any opensource things that can be a software engineering notebook or journal that is easy to use and painless?

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ptr_void超过 7 年前

Used vimwiki for a while until I accidentally deleted few top level file with lots of file links and now it is almost impossible to get it all organized again without going through very file. Tried some DIY versions with markdown files in directory structure, but the solution isn't too good.

anotherevan超过 7 年前

On the topic of tools, I'm wondering if QOwnNotes would work for this time of journal/notetaking.I recently moved off Basket and after an extensive search, found QOwnNotes seemed to fit my brain the best.<a href="http://www.qownnotes.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.qownnotes.org/</a>

bootcat超过 7 年前

I think jotting down very important points we realized while developing is worth noting down. May be in a gitbook. But having an actual paper or notepad journal and noting down everyday things is too much data and we rarely, and i mean like very rarely look at that a second time !

Fomite超过 7 年前

Despite being primarily a computational scientist, I still keep a proper "dead tree" lab notebook. It's been invaluable, both in keeping my thoughts ordered, and also referencing decisions toward old projects.

amirmansour超过 7 年前

If you're on a Mac, I highly recommend Quiver - "The Programmer's Notebook" (<a href="http://happenapps.com" rel="nofollow">http://happenapps.com</a>)No affiliation, just like and use it :)

spdegabrielle超过 7 年前

I find it hilarious that in science and engineering using a lab or engineers notebook is common practice and VC is rare, but in software engineering VC is common and keeping a notebook is rare.

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roadbeats超过 7 年前

I use Github for digital notes: <a href="https://github.com/azer/notebook" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/azer/notebook</a>And physical notebook for other things.

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kanishkdudeja超过 7 年前

I use Evernote for this since it also backs as a web clipping tool.Any article I like on the web which I might want to come back to in future, Evernote makes it easy to clip web pages as is.

zerr超过 7 年前

> do you keep a notebook (digital or plain dead-tree version) to record things you learnWhat's the point? After some time, that would the list of things you forgot... :)

jgamman超过 7 年前

yep i do and i've carried the habit from the lab into the workforce. it's mostly a write-many, read-few kind of thing but i've got a very loose system for capturing Action Items and i find having doodle space helps me keep track of the discussions other people are hafving. but then, i'm an ex-chemist too so biased sample... ;-)

jypepin超过 7 年前

I take A LOT of notes of everything. Mostly because I like writing things down. I NEVER find myself coming back to those, ever.