Comments on: Take note: Take notes!

By: Chris-Bierig

Chris-Bierig — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:17:15 +0000

Great idea, but will this work over the long run?

By: Javier

Javier — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:01:50 +0000

“The slightest ink is better than the brightest mind”

By: Taking Notes and Tweets « I, Geek

Taking Notes and Tweets « I, Geek — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 10:47:25 +0000

[...] to be useful in the long term. We never know when something is useful. One guy, Bill Shaw, has this point to make: Now again, if you’re like me, you might be saying, “This is a pain.” I admit it, it is a [...]

By: Ken Liu

Ken Liu — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:50:31 +0000

At my workplace, developers are encouraged to use JIRA (our bug tracking system) to keep notes on any issues they are working on. This has the added advantage of helping other members of the team find out about anything that was done to fix a particular bug. It’s also helpful if you need someone else to pick up where you left off.

It is a little more work to write notes that other people can understand, but it is useful in the long run.

By: Axel Rauschmayer

Axel Rauschmayer — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:24:05 +0000

If I may plug my own work: Hyena is great for keeping small tagged notes (see “quick notes” in the manual). It does have a learning curve, but it’s free, so you can find out if it suits your taste.

By: My daily readings 07/03/2009 « Strange Kite

My daily readings 07/03/2009 « Strange Kite — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:45:45 +0000

[...] Take note: Take notes! | Summa Blog [...]

By: Jeff Howell

Jeff Howell — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:04:28 +0000

On the OS X side, I have been using Journler (http://journler.com). Good feature set and easy searching.

The searching would be nicer if it worked with the shelf full of paper notebooks!

By: Daniel Furrer

Daniel Furrer — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:05:57 +0000

I agree that taking notes is a good idea and I’ve been doing so when working on projects for the last couple of years. Some ideas in this post and the comments are highly useful.

Personally I’m still using a paper-journal however. It allows me to quickly draw stuff and put notes in there even when in a meeting or sketch something during a discussion with a colleague. I found putting the date for each day fine grained enough and whenever I have something that I need to get back to I put a checkbox [_] in front of it so that I can check it when I have done that [x].

Daniel

By: Hal Helms

Hal Helms — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:31:26 +0000

You might like Evernote. I switched from OneNote recently and find it very useful for making the notes you’re talking about.

By: David Johnson

David Johnson — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:51:50 +0000

Thanks for the reminder and validation. I am the sole note-taker in the group which means that I get asked the questions about what we did and when. I use Evernote (non-synced) and record daily activities. I also set up a personal wiki on my server so that other people can access notes that I have taken. I have to use a windows machine at work so I use screwturn wiki (it was tough to get that unblocked!)

Also, time tracking with Rachota is a breeze! I have turned 2 of my 3 co-workers on to it.

Thanks for a great read.

By: Calvin Spealman

Calvin Spealman — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:48:28 +0000

I’ve been trying to do this for a while. Getting into the habit is the hardest part. I tried a paper notebook a week or two, and then made a Google Docs Spreadsheet with a single entry form. It adds a timestamp to the spreadsheet automatically, and I’ve got it in my toolbar and on my phone home screen, so I can make entries anywhere.

By: gregor

gregor — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:21:31 +0000

I’ve been doing this both at home for personal projects and at work for a few years now..
I add a small bit of structure with -tags- in my daily text file, so that each one has
-hours-
to record when I came and went
-workplan-
for what I’m trying to do, and what got done each day
-todo-
for all the interruptions and support calls I field during the day so I can get my mental stack context back
-projectspecific-
individual notes for each project/component

my editor supports little macros so i can findtag tag x to grab the last x notes on a topic in reverse descending order. this is great at home, where i jump from interest to interst and need bookmarks to remember what i was doing.
At work, grepping is more useful, but then I can move around in the time stream.
I also have lots of links to relevant wiki pages in our team wiki, cause iideally good reference and change info gets into there.

Being responsible for a large legacy system, the daybook is a great place to put a set of queries when I’m trying to untangle some behaviour, that I can then go back to next time I need to do the same thing, and eventaully if necc I can turn it either into a refactoring job for the system, or a procedure to resolve a problem documented in the team wiki.

By: pitnick

pitnick — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:35:08 +0000

“9:45am: Spent 15 minutes helping Mary track down an NPE in her service code.”
I try an even shorter style:
“20090101 Mary NPE service code /src/core/npe.c load_handle()”
Gives an instant recollection of what I did _exactly_

Document the catch / gotcha. That’s the crux.

By: Ben Northrop

Ben Northrop — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:41:10 +0000

I’ve been using OneNote for a little while now for tracking daily status for stand-ups, and it’s pretty much what I need - good WYSIWYG editor, search, groups, etc.

Picking the right tool up-front seems pretty key, cause once you have a few months of notes written, it’s tough to switch.

Good post.

By: jm

jm — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:56:56 +0000

I’ve been taking notes like this for about three years now and I have to admit I still haven’t got it perfected yet. In the beginning I took verbose notes detailing everything I did, but after a few months it became unwieldy to go back and manually search through a hundred pages of notes trying to remember where I might find that detail I knew I had seen.
It was a little better when I finally started doing everything on the computer, but invariably it seemed like I was recording a lot of information that I never ever needed again, and spending a lot of time doing so, and when I did need some tidbit of data it wound up being the one thing during the day in question that I had considered unimportant or for whatever reason had not documented.
I’ve sort of had to resign myself to simply keeping a whiteboard with items that really stand out, such as stupid bugs that I fight for half the day only to find there was some tangential solution that really should be unrelated to what I am doing (”oh! my program isn’t working because the router needs to be power cycled!”).

By: John Haugeland

John Haugeland — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:56:26 +0000

You should consider learning CMU’s Personal Software Process. You’re starting out in a good direction, but there’s a whole lot more to be derived here.

By: Iceman

Iceman — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:20:50 +0000

Emacs Notes mode used to be my tool of choice for this. Its automatic indexing of notes on the same topic was extremely useful - I could work in a stream-of-consciousness desultory mode and have the luxury of having my thoughts organized for me automatically.
These days, I tend to use Emacs org-mode more. No automatic indexing, but lots of other features - TODO lists (auto-organized), tables, etc. I shudder to think what my productivity would be without notes ….

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By: Lee Borio

Lee Borio — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:47:45 +0000

I started seriously taking notes when I switched from networking to programming in 2005. It took a while to find a tool I liked but I came across Confluence and have been very happy with it since then. I’m sure there are a ton of other tools, for me I has to be a wiki and Confluence is easy to setup/configure/run and has a pretty decent set of features. They have a FREE personal license.

By: Siva

Siva — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:20:26 +0000

I ll try to start doing that now on. I ve been using Evernote app for taking some misc notes. I found it quite good. The best part of it is you get access to your notes anywhere (ofcourse, you should be having internet connection)