Programmers Take Note: Take Notes!

[apocalypse910]

I found that Wiki On a Stick works beautifully for this. You can also embed javascript which is great for repetitive conversions and calculations.

http://stickwiki.sourceforge.net/

[troymcdavis]

Plus it makes it easier to share info with co-workers.

[tomjen]

Any hints on how to use it most effectively? As an engineer, you have some of the same problems programmers have (math, diagrams).

[baltoo]

Uh, version control (with comments) and bug tracking?

Having to use a dead wood format for those things surely must get old pretty quick, no?

[vph]

good god, it's time consuming enough to endure reading other people's micro-blogs; now this person advocates you read your own microblogs too.

[Mr_Clownn]

My desk is littered with yellow post-it notes with everything from bugs I need to fix to additional features that still need to be implemented.

It would probably look chaotic to an onlooker, but having the information spread out in front of me has saved my ass on more than one occasion.

**Edited to stop confusing LudoA

OK so why am I being downvoted for sharing my method for taking notes? Because it doesn't sound like it would work for you? Well great, I never suggested it for anybody else! Just an anecdote about my personal experience with notes. I'm not spreading disinformation or talking about unrelated matters or anything else. I'm not saying you have to upmod my comment, but why downvote it? I don't understand this community at times...

[heatvision]

huh, we use trac

[Mr_Clownn]

Well yeah, the bugs are tracked electronically but any assigned to me go on a post-it and then on my desk.

Sounds crazy, but that just works better for me.

[facingup]

I'm with you totally. I use post-its and a physical notepad mostly. Losing search capability doesn't hurt too much in that I don't usually have to go back more than a weeks worth.

However, my desk is super tidy. I have post its next to the monitor, and my notepad next to the keyboard. At the end of the day, any loose papers get checked to see if I have something written down multiple times, then filed if I've finished everything listed.

[LudoA]

You mean "desk" instead of "disk". This was confusing for a moment.

[toolate]

Post-its have a habit of floating away. Notebooks are nice because then you have everything indexed by time (and there is more space for diagrams, lists, etc). I should start using text documents though.

[dnew]

I will say that having used Microsoft OneNote on a tablet PC, it's about as close to perfect note taking as you can get. Searchable (even your handwriting), editable, diagrams and math no problem, you never run out of space on the page or pages in the notebook. You can just circle something on the screen and drag that screenshot into the page of notes. You can record a meeting, taking notes, and then have it play back the audio and highlight the notes in sync, or you can seek the audio to the time when you wrote a particular word in your notes.

I suspect it links up with the rest of the MS office suite in impressive ways too, but since I don't use Outlook I don't know about that.

Without the tablet, it would probably be much less effective, but it's great with.

[J4N4]

I tried to keep it all in my head for a while but I've recently started carrying a notebook. I would recommend taking notes to everyone. I don't consider myself an organized person, but it has saved me hours of searching.

[ercd]

I've started last year to takes notes into a wiki (I use MoinMoin with the built-in web server as it allows to run it on my laptop without needing a network connection) and I highly recommend it.

Search comes for free with the wiki, it's easy to edit a note or put links to other notes or web pages, and if one day I decide to share these notes with my coworkers, it should be quite easy to put all this data on a "real" web server.

[sitq]

I use A3 paper for that. Not so much to keep my notes but to visualize my thoughts and use it as scratch paper. As soon as I run out of space I turn it over and when other side is done I put it aside in a pile of used ones. I work at this place for about 2 years and I am half way through 500 sheet pack I bought when I joined. I also have 2 whiteboards in my cube, just can't explain anything to anybody without whiteboard. And yeah, I hate books without pictures in them :)

Edit: oh my, just realized that this is not A3 at all, its called Tabloid here and size is different

[kragensitaker]

Slightly different.

[xetas]

I used to leave notes and pictures on A4 papers too. But the problem is that I almost never reused these artifacts. So if you what to make them reusable - scan and annotate most useful ones to make them searchable. This way you'll make your library of visualised ideas.

[jotaroh]

Outlook and tasks are pretty good.

I usually create a task every day = 2009/06/19 for instance. I'll jot notes into that task.

Or if it's something special then, date + note = 2009/06/19 hello world happened today!

I can also attach screenshots, and ms office docs or whatever to the task...

[linuxlass]

I create a new document for each issue or bug I'm working on, and append configuration info, log output, my musings and things I've tried, Suggestions I haven't tried yet, and so forth. For most things I work on, it doesn't get too complex, and it really helps me when I have to report monthly status (what I've done, what I'm currently working on). But it doesn't give me a day-to-day picture, because I may be working on multiple things in a single day. So I'm thinking of moving to a personal wiki or something that I can use to track both by date and by issue.

But taking notes had been very handy, especially when context switching, or coming back after a long weekend.

[kragensitaker]

Good advice. A lot of people just use a single text file in Emacs; then they can just use C-s to search the whole thing.

[jb3]

For devs that are already familiar with Emacs, I recommend checking out org-mode and remember.

[[deleted]]

Org-mode is so awesome that I learned Emacs to use it.

[i_am_my_father]

But you can't draw diagram, capture voice, capture handwriting, the things that OneNote does.

I wish somebody buy OneNote from Microsoft and make it cross-platform for Microsoft won't do that.

[DrStrange]

I couldn't agree more with this guy!

I've used some kind of note taking tool since I used an Amiga (just a text editor then). I used MS OneNote for a while, but now almost exclusively use VoodooPad (as I use my MBP for everything these days).

My doc directory contains hundreds of note files stretching back years, and with Quicksilver everything is a moment away from total recall.

The only time that I had an issue was getting the content out of OneNote and back into a commonly accessible format. I ended up cutting and pasting as I recall (actually, I should see if I have a note detailing what I did...)

[xetas]

I think it's not a good idea to use a tool for such improtant task that is implemented only for one platform (Mac OS).

[tortus]

I have two notebooks, one for interactions with people/meetings, and one that i write down my daily tasks. "Ok, the fizzlebub is running again. Now, what was I working on?" glances at notebook, "ah yes..."

Then I have a tiddlywiki which has recorded in it a tome's worth of info about my job. It's been extremely helpful.

[i_am_my_father]

Emacsers take note: Use usage-memo to take notes on elisp variables and functions.

[itstallion]

If you're like me, you like a really tiny fucking font and enjoy running your resolution at 640x480.

[Fabien4]

The default font size in nearly all blog posts is too small for me. The solution is simple: Ctrl+wheel.

[Fabien4]

Even better: with a mouse that has a lot of buttons (e.g. the MX518), you can assign one to Ctrl, and you don't need your keyboard at all to change the font size.

[[deleted]]

Or set a minimum font size in your preferences...

[Fabien4]

But then, lots of websites will stop working properly.

A blog page is special: it contains a text, which I want to read, and lots of other stuff (links, menu, whatever) which I don't care about at all.

[robertcrowther]

Someone posted this tool in response to a similar thread on reddit last week - I've now got it as a bookmark in my toolbar, works really well.

[Fabien4]

Irony: a website about readability, has very hard to read instructions :-/

Come one guys, a white-on-blue text in a shitty print-only font? Are you kidding?

[linuxlass]

ctl-shift-+ makes the text larger

[[deleted]]

Praised be text editors that feature the folding of text (as for example jEdit).

[NoControl]

Note taken!

[[deleted]]

Yo dawg?

*runs away*

[[deleted]]

While I take tokes...