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The value of writing comments intended for your future self was confirmed in a strange way for me: I once found myself googling some faintly obscure question of
by caf 11y ago
The value of writing comments intended for your future self was confirmed in a strange way for me: I once found myself googling some faintly obscure question of systems programming, and soon found an article that answered my question perfectly. At that point I noticed with considerable surprise that I was reading a web archive of a Usenet posting I had made myself, some 10 years prior - of all the people to randomly run into on the Internet, your past self is one of the strangest.
- jpgvm 11y agoThis has happened to me more times than I would like heh. Makes me realise the fallibility of memory.
- NicoJuicy 11y agoI have this with stackoverflow sometimes :p
- junto 11y agoSame here. Also my old blog posts. My weirdest one was when I was searching for an answer to a progamming question and ended up finding (and then contacting) my "long lost" cousin (the name was fairly unusual). Turns out he became a programmer too.
- tome 11y agoThat's happened to me, but unfortunately I've mostly found my old questions, not my old answers!
- bentcorner 11y agoI've had this happen to me a few times, but usually it's "I've answered this before for someone else, and now I have the same question. What was my answer again?"
- annnnd 11y agoThis goes to show how useful it is to share your knowledge. You never know when you might need it back. :)
- why-el 11y agoHa, this actually happened to me just yesterday believe it or not. :D I looked up something and turns out it's 21 years old me who asked it in Stackoverflow four years ago.
- tel 11y agoThat's been occurring to me for a while with SO questions. I get about halfway through and begin to recognize the writing style. :)
- lambda 11y agoHeh, I was helping a colleague with some question, and I wasn't really sure about the answer, so we Googled and checked out the top hit on StackOverflow. Wound up being a question that I had answered a couple of years earlier, and forgotten the answer in the meantime.
- david-given 11y agoI've actually done the next stage: researched a problem, found a really helpful Stackoverflow answer, which it turns out I had written, which was a reply to a question which it turned out I had also written. The only disappointing thing being that due to causality constraints, I was unable to upvote past me's answer or further past me's question, which was a shame as they were both really useful.
- acdha 11y agoIn my case this is complicated by the fact that there's someone else with the same name who has both significant professional overlap and a similar writing style. There are a couple of times I've been half way through an archived mailing list post wondering how I managed to forget an answer so completely before scrolling down far enough to see his .sig at the end.
- kirubakaran 11y agoYes, and it is weirdly unsettling too... seeing how you used to phrase things differently. I've gone back and referred to this (Emacs code browsing tips) http://www.kirubakaran.com/articles/efficiently-browsing-text-or-code.html http://www.kirubakaran.com/articles/efficiently-browsing-tex... many times. Definitely helps to take some time and write. Even if you aren't helping anyone else, you're definitely helping yourself. https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-blogs https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/you-should-write-b...