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As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook
- psyclobe 1y agoI find writing really calms my brain and forces me to straighten my thoughts out. Even if I never review the notes it’s a big benefit.
- bufferoverflow 1y agoI don't understand the pen/physical notebook thing. It's slow to write, insanely slow to search what you've written, almost impossible to copy or share.
- bananapub 1y agoSo what? It’s not for any of those things. It’s part of the thinking process, same as having a walk and letting your mind wander or having a shower.
- abid786 1y agoIn comparison it’s much faster to draw, infinitely more portable and much less distracting. I use pen and paper for self notes that are throwaway in nature or exploring ideas. For artefacts that are meant to be shared with others I use a computer
- Brajeshwar 1y agoI believe that is the beauty. It makes you be intentional, your mind slows down at a pace that does a double write to your brain (helping you remember better). If remembering with your brain is the RAM, then writing it down is the ROM.
- kubami 1y agoIn the context of this post it's not about preserving or sharing the thoughts. Writing, in this case, is a "thinking tool". Forcing yourself to materialise the thoughts as actual, written, text helps form clear ideas.
- jes5199 1y agothat’s so alien to me. for me, writing by hand is frustrating to the point of distraction. if I want to think clearly, my best bet is to do it silently, in my head.
- serial_dev 1y agoThat's great if you can do it! To me, if the problem is too complex, or more likely, if I expect to be distracted by family and chores, "building in my head" is not the best option as it all falls apart and need to build it up from scratch (though admittedly faster than last time).
- karn97 1y agoMy brain has enough memory
- raincole 1y agoIt's a road bump that forces you to slow down. Which is sometimes a good thing, like taking a shower or walk.
- forty 1y agopeople's brains all work differently and for some of them manually writing help them think better, and apparently your are not in this case. I don't think there is much else to understand.
- specproc 1y agoEach to their own. I wholeheartedly agree with the author. I find it really hard to think deeply at a computer. Too many distractions. The speed of writing and search isn't a problem for me. With the writing, I wish I could write faster, but deep thinking isn't fast anyway. Search, well, 99% of what I write is never looked at again. It's all a process of working things out, committing stuff to memory. Whenever I'm stuck, stepping away from the computer is usually the best way forward.
- sph 1y agoFrom a quick search: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha... https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/11/23/why-writing-by-hand-is-still-the-best-way-to-retain-information/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/11/23/why-writing-by-hand-is... Writing by hand definitely is better for a squirrel brain like me. And searching is overrated, most note-taking is write-only and tends to accumulate without anyone ever reading it back. So optimize for memory retention so you can later form better mental associations with the material, rather than how searchable on a computer it is. Notes on a PC are inert, what you want is to integrate their contents into your brain so you can actually do something with it.
- WalterBright 1y agoWrite on!
- Edd314159 1y agoI also use a notebook and pen constantly as a software engineer - but never when I need any of the properties you just mentioned. It is absolutely the wrong tool for any long-term information store. Ephemeral think-it-through process notes only. Obsidian for anything that should live longer than the current problem I’m trying to solve.
- _thisdot 1y agoI used to have a hybrid setup of paper as an offloading tool + Notion as a knowledge management system. However, since moving to Obsidian, I've never felt the need to use paper. Adding a line item in my daily note is much faster and efficient for me
- draven 1y agoI use a notebook. It forces me to slow down. I don´t like to cross/erase blocks of text so I actually think about what I'm about to write before writing it. It helps the same way rubber duck debugging does. Also: I just like writing.
- gofreddygo 1y agoFunny. I was tolling the virtues of my spiral notebook which is always on my desk to a coworker, whom I was trying to get out of some trouble and i got... silence. That notebook is the difference between said coworker and I. She didn't get it. That notebook is the fastest most accessible tool to capture my thoughts. I can state concisely what was discussed in a team meeting last october before any notetaking tool boots up. I know kids names, birthdays and favorite movies of almost all my coworkers which I can glance without switching windows while sharing my screen. the impossibility of such content being legible to anyone else and being shared is a feature I value very highly. i take it where i want, introspect, take notes. No screen. No distractions. I doodle, draw lines, write jokes, whatever. Pages on the right are work things. On the left are my ideas. Index on the first page tells me exactly where to turn to for that idea and mockups i had on filling tedious forms. I know when I'm spinning my wheels. I can see the gaps in my thinking from months ago. I can see patterns in human behavior that I would otherwise have not noticed. The simplicity is a huge advantage. I stopped looking for anything better. I don't try to promote it either (except on rare occasions). Saved me hours.
- MrGilbert 1y agoI think an analog note taking device (woah!) requires more discipline than a digital one. In the digital world, you can always re-arrange your chaos at almost no cost, whereas you are screwed in the analog world. I'm curious: How do you organize your notes? If you mind to share.
- rsclarke 1y agoThe bullet journal method is a popular way.
- gofreddygo 1y agoFirst there's a work notebook and a personal one. both are semi structured, but work one has more structure. first page is always for index, split vertically and you get roughly 80 entries with about 3-4 words each. one for each page that i number as i go writing through the book. index usually has just pointers to days when i get interesting ideas. each right page is for 1 week that i label up top. a small margin is dedicated for recurring meetings. using only the right side allows quickly flipping through. rest of the page is for todos and logs. left pages are for related thoughts, ideas, etc from that week. sometimes overflows but not by much. For wordy stuff, i use pages from the back of the book. I don't use sentences much. Just few words with lines connecting them. Thats pretty much it - index, numbered pages and using just the right side per week. It works wonders for how simple it is. You'll find something else that works for you. Don't overthink this. Just start with a structure and let it evolve. side note - i do use a folder for plain text notes on my work laptop (that i keep open in sublime) for links and text that benefits from copy and paste. i would not care if it all got deleted or leaked out to the world. I also have another folder of interesting bookmarks and articles exported to pdf for reading on a flight on my phone. i have a dozen or so google docs with my thoughts on topics i'm interested in.
- tony-allan 1y agoAll true but I find that a pen and paper and a couple of diagrams help me think and solidify an idea.
- serial_dev 1y agoI took the pen+notebook idea a bit further, I use pen+paper (a sheet of paper). To me, none of the qualities you listed matter when it comes to sketching ideas, thinking about problems, staying on track while problem solving. When I'm done with the task, I read through my notes once and throw it out.
- WalterBright 1y agoI date the handwritten pages and keep them. I've been attacked more than once for copying, the notebook offers acceptable proof of provenance. It serves the same purpose as the lab notebook does for a researcher. The notebook doesn't take up significant room. If you still have a space problem, run it through a scanner.
- WalterBright 1y agoIf you want to get the most out of a physics lecture, leave the laptop at home. Instead, bring a spiral notebook and some colored pens. Write everything down the prof writes on the blackboard. It's remarkable how much of the lecture you'll remember. And when you read your handwritten notes, you'll remember the lecture that went with it.
- guappa 1y agoYeah good luck writing with coloured pens at the speed teachers speak.
- aragilar 1y agoWhy are you focusing on what they are saying, rather than what they are writing (there's an important distinction)?
- WalterBright 1y agoI would copy what they were writing. The professors had 9 blackboards available, and they'd use them all during a 55 minute lecture, and then some. Some would write with their left hand while erasing with the right (!). It was a heluva time for me. Never before or since have I learned so much so fast. Blink and I fell behind. In retrospect, I sorely wished I had set up a cassette recorder and recorded all the audio. It would be a gold mine today, as all those lectures are lost to time. On the other hand, I had no money to buy cassette tapes at the time.
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoI never learnt much in those sort of lectures. Eventually I figured out I needed to study the material before the lecture and use the lecture to cement what I had already learnt or occasionally answer questions that had come up.
- aragilar 1y agoSorry, I was replying to guappa suggesting that they were focusing on the wrong thing.
- pif 1y agoIf you only need to write sentences, what you say makes sense. If you need to draw approximate diagrams, or formulae, or flows, or trees, or whatever else, instead...
- Veen 1y agoThey aren’t optimising for speed, sharing, or searchability. Notes of this type aren’t an inadequate database, but a tool for thinking. Note-takers visualize and symbolise their thinking while they work through a problem. Writing and drawing reduce cognitive load and externalise information so it doesn’t have to be held in memory. Notes also create a useful record of that process so you can see how you got to your solution. Notebooks are just a convenient UI for that process.
- cladopa 1y agoI use A4 sheets of paper, pens with different colours and fluorescent markers. Nothing beats that for me (and I have a iPad Pro with stylus) and I use emacs with org mode too. I use an automatic scanner to store the important papers as documentation. Now you can even send those to gemini or google cloud to digitalise it for cheap. At any given time I have four sheets of paper over my desk that I can see in parallel, but I could have 8 or 10 for complex problems with areas equivalent to engineering or architectural blueprints. Having said that, I can draw and paint very well as I was interested since childhood and had formal training. Probably is not for everyone, but it is for me.
- _Algernon_ 1y agoI mean the obvious example is that you can sketch graphs or figures easily without any additional friction. Very few digital notes allow that.
- wrp 1y agoDivision on this topic reminds me of the division between those who prefer light vs heavy development tools. Some enjoy mastering and wielding powerful tools, but others see them as a distraction.
- Eavolution 1y agoI like it when trying to work things out/design things as I can easily scribble down quick drawings to keep myself right. This is much easier with a pencil and paper than trying to do it on a computer to me.
- jbs789 1y agoMany studies showing it aids recall more effectively than typing or event writing on a tablet.
- Hamatti 1y agoOP here. > It's slow to write Only to an extent. I write fast enough with pen and paper that my thinking is the bottleneck — which isn't really that fast. I don't need to write down everything I think so it also acts as a filter and processor of those thoughts. > insanely slow to search what you've written Compared to digital notes system, sure. But the way I use my notes, I don't usually need a full-text search to find stuff. I remember what I've been working on, I often browse through my notebooks to revisit ideas and most often these notebook notes are kind of a "working copy" where the search relevance is often just for the feature so it only needs to be fast to search for a few days or weeks. I also do copy many of my notes down in digital format too when there's something worth capturing for long term storage for the sake of searching for example. > almost impossible to copy or share 100%. Sharing is not a consideration for me, these are my raw pure thoughts and explorations, they don't often make much sense to other people as-is. Sometimes I may take a photo of a UI sketch or something to share if needed but otherwise when I have something to share, I write it based on my notes rather than sharing my notes as they are.
- roryirvine 1y agoSearching through a physical notebook does take a few moments, but the upside is all of that context you get to drink in during the search. I typically get through a couple of B5 pages a day, so homing in on the thing I want to look at is a matter of opening the notebook to roughly the right fortnight and then flicking through up to a dozen pages in either direction. A tenth of a second per page is enough to scan for major events - what projects was I working on at the time? Were there any major interruptions to my flow, or changes in direction? And then, once I've found the right day, seeing the detail of everything I was doing at the time triggers a flood of memories - I remember all of the conversations, decisions, problems, and ideas that were current at the time of the entry in question. I've tried a number of digital notetaking systems, but none has been able to give me so much context so quickly as a paper notebook.
- hk1337 1y ago> slow to write that's probably the most important thing. it forces you to slow down and think it through and actually absorb it. Searching what I have written in the past would be useless for me because it wouldn't necessarily make sense. It's more about the physically writing it out.
- js4ever 1y agoCalling a notebook the “most important tool” for a dev is pure romanticism. Useful for some, sure, but let's not pretend it outweighs a debugger, version control, or CI. This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.
- zwnow 1y agoIn a few years of my career now I never had to use a debugger or CI. Console debugging is good enough usually. On version control I agree.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoCI is really nice with multiple platforms or multiple people. Solo projects for Linux, I never bother
- polishdude20 1y agoI was the same until I started working on a Go server. It helps immensely when I want to know the value of objects say when a request is handled and how that flows.
- aerhardt 1y agoI do not know what you work on, but debugging is indispensable for certain workloads. Print debugging doesn’t come close to setting up a breakpoint and inspecting every single variable in the stack with a good interface. You don’t even have to select what to print and where, anything can be printed anywhere in two clicks. A UI like the debuggers in Jetbrains IDEs provides smart rendering for all types so that for example map or list elements can be collapsed. The entire call stack is neatly organized and searchable too. It saves hours, creates less friction and also greatly enhances exploratory debugging, where you don’t even know where in the call stack your problem might be. I’d feel very hindered and unhappy if I didn’t have access to a good debugger.
- zwnow 1y agoI dont know, sounds more like a design issue to me, if your app requires this amount of information to get debugged properly.
- Brajeshwar 1y agoI like writing much better,[1] and after a fair share of Moleskin, Field Notes, and a long streak with Muji, I’m now blown away by Midori. I have already gotten a few, and I’m going to get a lot more. The tactile ‘scratch’ of the fountain pen on the Midori Paper is so soothing, it makes me feel like I’m a poet even when I’m writing down the most mundane idea that I just had. :-) https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/ https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/
- n2h4 1y agowow, what a website. got totally immersed in your backstory. last time i had such fun was with https://meyerweb.com/ https://meyerweb.com/
- zuzuleinen 1y agoI like to have an Obsidian vault for every company I work for. But when I really need to think I upgrade to pen and paper.
- ArthurStacks 1y ago[flagged]
- cheema33 1y ago> Great blogpost to advertise yourself to potential employers that youre completely useless Is it really that difficult to imagine that what does not work for you might work for someone else?
- subjectsigma 1y agoEmpathy is in short supply these days but especially on HN. Very strange to watch adult humans fail at basic theory of mind tests such as understanding that other people can have their own preferences
- ArthurStacks 1y agoBeing useless isnt a preference In my company if an engineer came out with this nonsense he would be placed on my special system of making his role so unpleasant to the extent that he leaves
- subjectsigma 1y agoI have a feeling the same thing would happen to you at my company for a different reason
- theshackleford 1y agoYeah he should save it for HN comments like you do.
- Aziell 1y agoIt actually works. Every time I get stuck, writing things down helps me slow down, think more clearly, and move forward more steadily. Pen and notebook really are an underrated but essential part of being a developer.
- tony-allan 1y agoThere is another interesting linked post… https://hamatti.org/posts/how-i-take-work-notes-as-a-developer/ https://hamatti.org/posts/how-i-take-work-notes-as-a-develop...
- irjustin 1y agoHard disagree. My most important tool is google sheets. Multiplayer mind mapping; idea organization; clear understanding for all; fast reorg; sequential and/or parallel flows or concepts; etc etc. The worst part is having large calls watch me misspell things and fumble to correct it on a shared screen.
- sky2224 1y agoSome of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away. I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful. If there's something worth noting down, then it goes into documentation, so others can stumble upon whatever quirk I've come across in the future. If there's something I really want to remember, I create flashcards and do spaced repetition until I've learned the thing. But that's just me, and I imagine my way doesn't work for a lot of people. I think people are taking this post a little too personally and literally. This is a writer's piece. The title is meant to share a philosophy that this developer subscribes to. Nothing about it is declaring that others must subscribe to it as well. If a pen and notebook don't work for you, then don't use it.
- cheema33 1y agoThis is how my brain works. I do have a notebook. My stream of thoughts for one day go one one page for that day. I turn the page the next day and I almost never look back. There may be some value in looking back. But, I have not been able to make myself do it.
- sixtyj 1y agoI'm sure it's very personal :) Because everyone has their own reality, workflow and reading a piece either resonates or dissonates with you (personally). I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet". On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost. But today's kids, being digital natives, may take a different approach. Paper&pen may present anxiety for them. So it very much depends on the family we grew up in.
- sph 1y agoDon’t try to transform a paper notebook into a database. All those organizational tools are elaborate forms of procrastination. What I do is write notes in the best format for paper: an append-only log with a date on top. Whether digitally or on paper, I rarely if at all need to consult notes from a long time ago, so the log is good enough for most use cases. In fact, as I mentioned elsewhere, writing by hand is not to store data, it’s a way to effectively digest information and incorporate it into your brain. You’ll get a lot of benefit of writing something and immediately throwing it away, so who cares about indexing it for later.
- unsungNovelty 1y agoI have tried both. Going fully digital and fully notebook oriented. The best I have come up with is to have long term notes in a note app but your on going current thought process in a book. Like what you are currently doing or it's process. This helps with the search and copy issue of going physical. But writing things for your ongoing process / tasks makes you remember things so much better. Sometimes, all I have to do is write. I don't have refer them. But if I have to, I usually have a better sense of how I got to the end result cos I have the journey written down in my notebook. Also being a fountain pen lover helps.
- quectophoton 1y agoSorry, that's not allowed. You must choose one side or the other, and fully commit to it (like everyone else in this comment section). But it's too late now, since you've already tried both sides (fully digital and fully notebook) with an open mind, that means your opinion is automatically invalid and wrong. Them's the rules.
- amelius 1y agoAnd your secretary types in the code and it runs in the first attempt?
- indrex 1y agoI thought so too. But I would rather use docstrings and comments because: - Readable by LLMs/others in the context of the code - Searchable - Version controlled
- WalterBright 1y agoThe D programming language was designed on a spiral notebook.
- adampwells 1y agoI have been writing software for about 20 years (following on from OChem PhD and research for a few years). I am 'senior' and get paid plenty in Oz... I have aphantasia - I can't visualise/picture things in my mind, so I use pen and paper or whiteboards A LOT! I create various ERDs, mind maps, sequence diagrams etc. I use a ReMarkable which makes it a bit easier to move stuff around and makes it more effective. I get that some people might think it is 'pure romanticism', but pen and paper has been crucial for my success.
- cheema33 1y agoMost humans cannot visualize too many things in their minds at one time. I think the limit is low on average. We all therefore benefit from pen and paper. But I recognize that some more than others.
- alfiedotwtf 1y agoSame boat - 20 years experience, in Oz, with aphantasia... I've only realise in the past month that I do poorly on Live Coding interviews because since the interview is on the clock I immediately start coding so I have something to show, but since I can't picture anything in my minds eye I'm literally coding blind - rereading the question over and over hoping the solution will come! So after realising this I've started using an A2 notebook to draw out the problem, work my way through the problem on paper, and finally map out a solution (still on paper) ... then like magic, the code comes naturally (I'm guessing that's how normal people think when programming)!
- ho_schi 1y agoI'm also into team note taking. Work In Progress Endless printer paper or doted A4 paper (I love it). It is is the planing area of my brain. Some specific notes are kept for long term and re-used, which is seldom - this can (should) moved into a moleskin. Probably I should use the moleskin more? I need a pen or pencil, on paper to plan. Long Term Storage I don't use it to think. Mostly digital, Markdown. Stored on my filesystem, Git or IMAP. Avoiding all weird and soon defunct commercial things.
- avinassh 1y agoI want to ask developers here who keep and maintain notebooks: How exactly do you take notes? What things do you write down? And how does it help you, or how has it made you a better developer? OP's post also references a similar post [0], but I am curious to hear from the people here. [0] - https://hamatti.org/posts/how-i-take-work-notes-as-a-developer/ https://hamatti.org/posts/how-i-take-work-notes-as-a-develop...
- voidUpdate 1y agoI don't tend to use it extensively, but I find it much easier to work out things, especially graphical things, when I can doodle it on some paper rather than having to type it into notepad. For example, yesterday I was working out how to generate a mesh of triangles and needed to work out the vertex indices. It was quicker to doodle a net of triangles and note number them than to try and do it on the computer. It's probably because I'm a very visual thinker. It's also easier to work out an equation on paper than on a computer when I've got fractions and powers and stuff that are annoying at best to represent in plain text
- gherkinnn 1y agoAs in "the most important accessory beyond a computer and a text editor", I absolutely agree for how I work and think. Nothing I have tried comes close. No iPad, writing code directly, talking it through, thinking it through, sketching it out on whatever drawing tool you might like. Pencil and paper are all I want. Now, let's argue about our favourite colours and why teal is objectively the best.
- kennu 1y agoI understand the sentiment, but I don't get how you could draw more complex software plans by hand. I usually use Draw.io/Diagrams.net, and the drawings get pretty large and need reorganizing dozens of boxes several times while planning the architecture. OTOH if the plan is very simple and obvious, and can be drawn out in one go, it doesn't really need a diagram in the first place, so I skip spending time drawing the obvious stuff.
- Hamatti 1y agoOP here. I don't often do very complex software plans like that. My working notes are often on a smaller scale like individual features or so. If we need to document the full architecture for the project, I'm happy to do that with digital tools. But while I'm planning parts of it or designing it, I do better with pen and paper. My main issue with many of the digital tools I've tried comes down to the added friction if I need to switch to a different tool in the app when I switch between circles and rectangles and text and the fact that I find free-hand drawing with mouse really difficult. > OTOH if the plan is very simple and obvious, and can be drawn out in one go, it doesn't really need a diagram in the first place, so I skip spending time drawing the obvious stuff. I think there's a middle ground where it might be easy to draw on one go but deciding what to draw and how things work together and what's needed requires iterations and for that, thinking through drawing and writing helps me a ton.
- kennu 1y agoI guess there's many cases where you don't really know how complicated or simple the solution will end up to be, and start drawing it while thinking about it.. I must admit that those are usually the most interesting parts of the work.
- kayodelycaon 1y agoI actually do all this stuff in my head and use hierarchies of bullet points in a text file to externalize some stuff. Some of these may end in arrows that point to a different process. I never use paper because I'm always moving these bullet points around and inserting stuff between them. Apps are too slow. I never write down all the information because these notes are enough for me to reload everything. It's pretty easy to see that I didn't write something when there's a gap in my notes. I never wrote it down because I'm going to come up with the same or better solution quickly. This isn't really helpful for anyone else and doesn't work well with pair programming.
- sa-tre 1y agoFor me, pen/pencil and paper is for throwaway notes when I need to distil an idea down or slow my thinking to focus on something I can't quite reason about in my head fully. It's more of an unloading mechanism that gives me more space to think than my head allows alone. It's not actually something I use for note taking at all, for this I tend to just use OneNote/Obsidian/Confluence (whatever I need to at the time). I would like to explore using stuff like Zettlekastan note systems with emacs a bit more for actually holding onto a web of knowledge that I refer to. Though this is a different ends, and so requires a different means.
- wrp 1y ago> I learned very early on in my career that I’m not very good at thinking when I’m at a computer. Before personal computers, I had the same experience at the typewriter. I find it very inhibiting to have a machine staring me in the face, waiting, while I try to be creative.
- kstenerud 1y agoMost comments are focusing on the physical pen and paper aspect of this post, but are missing the underlying principle: The author uses pen and paper because when they sit down at a computer they end up shifting to "function mode" where they're implementing rather than designing. That's it. The important takeaway is to make sure you don't fall into the trap of implementing when you should be designing. How you maintain that balance is up to you.
- Hamatti 1y agoOP here. Exactly! So happy to read you managed to pick up the core gist of the story. It's important to find the tools that work best for YOU. I partially wanted to write this because I've often felt as an outsider in tech teams where everyone sits at a computer 7.5 hours every day and I'm the one thinking better when I'm away from the screen and keyboard. So I wanted to offer an example to those who are like me and also feel like they might not belong.
- noosphr 1y agoI used computers for a lot longer than 7.5 hours a day. Doubly so since I got a home desktop with a tablet display and 3 other screens. I find that the reason why productivity in offices is so low is that: 1). The available screen real estate for doing work is tiny. 2). The tools people use have happy paths that force you to work a specific way. 3). Deep thinking is impossible with interruptions. As an example of a tool which works best on computers, I've finally recreated the literate environment I used at a previous job on my own time and from scratch: https://olive-alayne-28.tiiny.site/ https://olive-alayne-28.tiiny.site/ I can now work happily with Emacs in an environment that supports deep thinking about code instead of fighting with it every step of the way. If you're interested [1] and [3] from that paper are great introductions to literate programming and noweb + emacs + synctex is by far the most pleasant IDE I've ever used. I also can't rave enough about how well pen tablets work with xournalpp these days. I can take notes on top of multi-thousand page printouts of code bases and rearrange, doodle, remix, and add new pages wherever I feel like. Even five years ago there was no tool that would let you do that without the threat of a major crash is you wrote too fast.
- bellBivDinesh 1y agoCan’t grep a notebook. There’s a good insight in there about preserving your process of arriving at a conclusion, but it’s better done in obsidian or notion or something like that.
- 123sereusername 1y ago[dead]
- atum47 1y agoI still have my notebook with the notes and drooling from my machine learning class back in college. I remember drawing nodes and connections to wrap my head around hidden layers, weights and all that. It is definitely super helpful to take notes and draw stuff when you're a dealing with a complex subject.
- jimlawruk 1y agoI have a notebook that I bring on vacations or weekend trips to jot down occasional bouts of inspiration. A few of those pages contain designs of pet projects that may or may not get implemented later. It can be fun to sit on the beach and map out a potential design even if you never end up implementing it.
- ednite 1y agoGreat discussion. In my opinion, the real takeaway isn’t about notebooks vs. digital tools, it’s about what shifts your mental gears. Every time we switch modes, it forces our brain to pay attention differently. That fresh context can boost focus, creativity, even recall. For example, I recently stopped coding all the time and picked up a new hobby at night, writing. That simple change gave my brain a reset and actually improved the performance during the day. Same goes for planning: switching from digital to pen and paper breaks the routine and makes your brain engage differently. It’s less about the tool and more about how the change wakes you up.
- cleak 1y agoThe book Smarter Faster Better introduced me to the concept of disfluency - the idea that extra friction such as awkward fonts, new environments, different tools, etc will pull you out of autopilot mode and force you to think in new ways. I haven’t seen references to it elsewhere, but it’s changed how I approach problems and learning the last 9 years. Switching to a notebook is one great way I use to trigger this as well.
- ednite 1y agoThanks for sharing. I just added Smarter Faster Better to my reading list, along with Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind. Both seem to explore how breaking out of autopilot can unlock better thinking, which is exactly what I’ve been noticing in my own routines.
- bookofjoe 1y agoGreat book: https://www.amazon.com/Five-Day-Course-Thinking-Edward-Bono/dp/1785040863/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18GQKEESAROZJ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.BGjfShH0wtN9--_va9d7RHyYt8unnneWwy4dR7VG3z_GjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.-On3wlalwawIeSRI3bzVOaIhwlLVOVysoDtK-zUQ8K8&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+five+day+course+in+thinking+de+bono&qid=1748469624&s=books&sprefix=the+five+day+course+in+thinking+de+bono%2Cstripbooks%2C81&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Five-Day-Course-Thinking-Edward-Bono/...
- gjadi 1y ago
- uludag 1y agoI must say, without hesitation and doubt, that Claud 4 is my most important tool. I literally feel like I have the intelligence of the entire human race at my fingertips, giddily awaiting a caress from the tips of my fingertips. I honestly could not imagine my developer life without the twain of Opus and Sonnet. Not my opinion of course, I just thought I'd include it as I found it surprisingly missing from the comments.
- justinrubek 1y agoThat model has been out for something like a week, and it's already the most important tool? That's a very interesting take to me. I tried it, and it found Claude 4 particularly unusable personally, 3.7 seems better.
- directevolve 1y agoYou definitely don’t have the intelligence of the entire human race on Claude. You have a generative model of most of the published, digitized text the human race has produced. I’m happy to call it intelligent, and, as a daily user of the most recent pro LLM models, extremely useful for tasks like coding and, to some extent, search. But as soon as I turn from implementing and debugging code to conceptual thinking or building a mental mode of a problem domain, LLMs currently function for me mainly as Grammarly on steroids. There’s no one tool in this space that’s supreme - Zotero, DuckDuckGo, Google Scholar, pen and paper, draw.io, and Google Docs all play a role. I’m a PhD student, YMMV, the LLMs do improve over time, etc.
- FigurativeVoid 1y agoOne of the few things that I miss about working in an office is a large whiteboard and standing in front of it with a colleague. Working on an architecture with a peer and marker really led to some elegant class designs.
- barrenko 1y agoWhiteboard (blackboard etc.) is life.
- noosphr 1y agoI have a 24 inch pen display. The last time I worked as a CTO I bought them for the whole team. Being able to redraw things on a shared digital white board beats having to redraw the same 4 boxes a dozen times because you keep running out of space. Also saves people taking photos of the white board before erasing.
- alfiedotwtf 1y ago> I bought them for the whole team I have to say, that's pretty damn cool! I'm such a fan of diagramming code and systems, so having this for everyone on the team I'm guessing would have done wonders! I now have a A2 paper notebook (I think it's actually supposed to be used as an artist's sketchbook) permanently next to my keyboard (my mouse sits on it) and I can't imagine living without it now... but a 24" pen display, mindblown!
- noosphr 1y agohttps://www.xp-pen.com/product/artist-pro-24-gen-2-4k.html https://www.xp-pen.com/product/artist-pro-24-gen-2-4k.html 4k and quite affordable. And it's a real screen the rest of the time. Like I said the main quality of life improvement has been xournalpp. Development in the last year has taken off and it's one of the most pleasant projects to contribute to.
- abletonlive 1y agoI use excalidraw for this and think it’s better than whiteboard because 1) it’s prettier and less messy 2) the digital markers are never dry 3) it encourages more edits and changes I basically start all my technical designs in excalidraw now
- submeta 1y agoWhy a superlative? For me it’s lots of things: My notebook, my editor, my terminal, my ide, my ipad, and so much more. So why „the“ most important? :)
- infermore 1y agoread the article?
- hk1337 1y agoOne more person confirming pen(cil) to paper helps make the connection. I go through several different notebooks, none of which I keep what is in it because it wouldn't make sense to me now but writing it out helped for it to make sense to me then. It's like those tv episodes with the kid making a cheat sheet on his shoe then never needs it because he remembered everything.
- namblooc 1y agoThat got me curious how the author debugs his code using a notebook!
- Hamatti 1y agoOP here! That's a wonderful question, sorry it took me over a week to notice it and reply. A lot of the practical debugging happens with debugging tools on the computer but every now and then I run into issues where it's not obvious why something is acting up. Usually in these cases, there's a conceptual issue, maybe a misunderstanding or an assumption that took me the wrong way. In those cases, I like to start by writing down my understanding and assumptions of the situation: what is the problem, how does it happen (do I really know how to replicate it), what should be happening. The act of writing it down (which I call a brain dump) helps me organise my thoughts and often that helps me notice the gaps in my knowledge or understanding which activates my brain to think about the missing bits which often leads to revelations.
- Hamatti 1y agoOne time, when I had just started on a legacy project and was struggling to understand how things worked and where the bug was, I printed out many many pages of the code, booked a meeting room for the day, taped the code printouts to the walls of the meeting room and started drawing and annotating. It helped me see patterns from a birdseye view of the code and see how things related to each other and I eventually found multiple issues that I was able to fix more efficiently at once because I had taken that viewpoint instead of just trying to fix one class or function at a time.
- regus 1y agoI have tried multiple times to make notebooks work for me for note taking or tracking tasks but it always falls apart eventually. First it was bullet journals, then I tried something a little less structured but in the end I couldn’t get it to stick. Now I use Apple Notes which is good enough.
- ge96 1y agoMost jobs I've had I use a macbook and I take daily notes in the Apple Notes app Ex: W22 D111 Wed May 28, 2025 (7) The (7) means hours since I'm a contractor and I do walks/subtracts time that I fill in with PTO I will probably get a remarkable 2 again at some point, it seems redundant if you have a tablet like device (I have a Surface Book 3) but that is rarely used funny. I used to use an RM2 a lot but had to sell it when I needed cash. It's cool that it's programmable.
- digitalsushi 1y agowe have given new life to the vim-emacs religious war, this time pens-vs-keyboards. fascinating
- staplung 1y agoAs per Hot Fuzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-ZzGNQnuo8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-ZzGNQnuo8
- jokoon 1y agomany times, I solved problem I was stuck with, by hanging outside at the park, with pen and paper
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sawaali 1y agoI have thought through tough problems using pen and paper. Have tried a lot of iterations of digital notebooks, but lost the fluidity and malleability of paper. These days I have found the iPad + Pencil with an infinite canvas to be the best fit. I use Ahmni (https://www.ahmni.app/ https://www.ahmni.app/) which is a delight.
- culebron21 1y agoI had to work on a coding project with a serious geometric problem in the core, and no amount of thinking over code itself could help, whereas on paper, I could find the solution easily. And implementing it in code didn't progress, until I wrote down all the formulae, in sequence, on paper too.
- agentultra 1y agoAs I like to say, I do most of my programming before I touch a keyboard. The single most powerful thing I do is ask questions and write down the answers. When I want to understand a system this is the fundamental step that cannot be skipped. How crucial it is that I understand the system will tell me how formal I need to be in my thinking. If it's a basic web application or a report I need to generate it's a simple, informal note. If we're talking about a critical system that's distributed and requires high-availability with hard limits on processing time and the consequence of getting things wrong is that businesses and people lose money/property? Then I'll bust out the mathematics and model things formally. I've experimented as well with writing code on paper first. This doesn't work so well with procedural languages without some form of shorthand/formalism. It works much better with statically-typed functional programming languages. When using such languages I mostly need to reason about the types: the implementation is a matter of filling in the holes which can be done when I'm at the keyboard. The more I learn to "think in types," the better this works but I'm not super great at it yet. Notebooks are where it all begins. I also use notebooks to journal my work. I use the bullet journal system to keep track of my work. Keeping it on paper forces me to sit in front of it and physically remind myself of my tasks. It helps me stay focused on the day to day activities and not lose track of my longer-term goals. After using one long enough this way it becomes a chronicle of my work. Handy for performance review season. A great deal of programming work comes out of these journals. Some folks prefer digital tools and that's fine and dandy. I'm just old school and prefer physicality. Paper and pen work on the level my brain works on and gives me a break from screen, keyboard, and constant stream of notifications. Room and freedom to think without interruptions is important and useful.
- sylens 1y agoAfter trying all sorts of note taking tools and apps over the years to try to get myself organized, part of my New Year's Resolution this year was to just buy a stack of To-Do list notepads that had a spot for the date and just let me write stuff down ad-hoc while in meetings or working on stuff. It's amazing how much more productive I've been since doing this. The item in question for anyone curious: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BS1WJZNW https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BS1WJZNW
- hnthrowaway0315 1y agoA notebook and a pen clear one's mind before touching the keyboard. I agree it is essential to clear one's mind before committing code to the computer. Sometimes I even write full pages of pseudo code before writing code in real programming languages. However this is only for things that I care about. I'm OK to throw shits on the wall and see if it sticks for anything I don't care about.
- calebm 1y agoI'm pretty sure a developer can get more done with a computer than a notebook...
- xutopia 1y agoFor me it's taking a walk.
- codyb 1y agoBasically any... autopilot behavior for me is going to turn into some insight at some point or another (although it's good to be in the present too! Now I try to think in Spanish which forces me to be present cause it's such a slow process for me still lol, but actually super useful I've found for continuing to flesh out those neural pathways is to just sit and talk to myself outloud in Spanish about whatever I'm doing all day) Also love writing things on paper. I love using different pens, and write in different styles sometimes (cursive, block, normal, whatever). I just take quick throwaway notes on paper or I'll sometimes sit down and outline things for an hour over a few sheets just to put organization to some large task which I'll translate into something for consumption by others later. Almost always throw these away. Sometimes I work through a notepad, sometimes it's a little notebook, sometimes it's printer paper... getting away from the screen for a bit is lovely. And I set up a notes section on my computer which I can pop open with a quick <space>X in ViM which has a directory structure giving me spaces for recurring meetings, architecture work, or notes on whatever initiatives I'm trying to push through. I index file names with 01-, 02- etc and if I have a section that branches out I'll just add another index so 01A-, 01B-, etc... Having everything in ViM with a tmux conf setup that scaffolds out a ton of different spaces I've set up mnemonic keyboard shortcuts to navigate to is really helpful in reducing the overload of having Slack, IDEs, browsers, notepads, music, etc etc etc all open at once (since on a good day I just have Slack, Outlook, iTerm, Firefox and maybe Figma or Music open at most points). I'm also quick to wipe away tabs in the browser... Next up I'm diving into Figma so I can turn these ideas into beautiful diagrams and even mock interfaces my partners can ingest visually for easier understanding of complex spaces Finally, and I'm thankful I can afford to do this, but I turn all notification sounds off, Slack'll bounce once from the hidden dock... It's great, distraction free, tailored to my needs, a fair amount of variety, and some really nice productive times.
- idlip 1y agoTbh for me both seems the same. I can ignore both digital notifications and open book/paper lying there to reminder me of a task. Its the mental state of person to commit for getting things done. Digital method gives lot of space for organizing tho.
- thecrumb 1y agoAfter scribbling down notes in paper notebooks for years I finally decided I didn't want to kill any more trees to take notes I seldom referenced. Now I have a digital tablet (Supernote) on which I scribble down all the meaningless stuff throughout the day. Then I review that and anything useful or important goes into Obsidian where I can tag/search it later.
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y agoOn the scale of the amount of harm you personally do to the planet on a daily basis, I have to imagine wasting paper is one of the least consequential things.
- magistr4te 1y agoI've never done the math on this, but my immediate thought on that reasoning was always that you'd have to burn through a LOT of paper to actually have such an electronic product be more environmentally friendly. Does anyone have concrete data on this?
- __natty__ 1y agoI found some data on slate - between 7000-14000 sheets to balance an iPad over 3 years of usage. [0] [0] https://slate.com/technology/2011/09/paper-versus-the-ipad-is-taking-notes-on-a-tablet-computer-or-a-notepad-more-environmentally-responsible.html https://slate.com/technology/2011/09/paper-versus-the-ipad-i...
- ggdhdj 1y agoI think my brain works the exact opposite of what he describes. I can only think about code, while I write it. Interpreted languages are a blessing for me. I was taught the approach described in the post in school (it's the Pascal way after all) and I never understood, how people can actually work like this. There really seem to be (at least) two types of programmer brains.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoI use engineering paper and a mechanical pencil extensively for software development work, a habit I picked up in my chemical engineering days. None of it is saved. I use it to extend my working memory for complex design problems, and for this purpose I find it very effective. The advantage of paper and pencil is that it is naturally and efficiently amenable to non-linear and somewhat arbitrary patterns of access and representation. Software really struggles at this because computer UIs force everything into coarse linear workflows no matter the presentation, which makes navigating and rewiring a large number of orthogonal dimensions awkward and inefficient on the best days.
- neilv 1y ago> None of it is saved. As we're absorbing this idea... I've seen employment contracts for technical people that arguably might consider these handwritten notes to be IP artifacts, which must be preserved and made accessible to the company. If that's your situation, you could scribble the date, your name, project, etc. in some margin of the piece of paper, and stick it in a pile/folder. To eventually be scanned, and the file put somewhere accessible, and/or the paper technically preserved. In a startup, you might also want to preserve things like these for nostalgia, even if they have no IP value. One seed startup, I kept a folder of "nostalgia" photos, video clips, screenshots, etc., of early prototypes, people working late, incremental successes, etc., and it was quickly a good thing. It's amazing how well you can progress, and what positive feelings you have some of these things that quickly become nostalgic. Anyone can see the current state of the code in the repo, but here's the pencil sketch on quadrille paper (or a napkin) one evening that became our architecture.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoAt least in my case, it is difficult to overstate how unlike linear “notes” those scribblings actually are. They aren’t remotely consumable outside the context in which they were created. It really is treated like swap space for working memory. I do go through all the old papers when I discard them but 99% of the time there is no discernible value. The thought process that created them is strongly non-linear, which does not lend itself to naive linear consumption at all later date.
- visviva 1y agoI was kind of hoping for a deep-dive on notebook types and features, not gonna lie.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cja 1y agoHammock-driven Development https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/HammockDrivenDev.md https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi... Default mode network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
- voilavilla 1y agoThe bell-curve meme popular on reddit showing both extremes using the same solution, while the "average" cries, is dead on. OP is on the right path: think before you code. One of the neat things about being in the last few years of my career (started in 1988) is how the tools change. I'm a senior principal software architect at a large-ish company. And I don't write a single line of code. I write everything in Visio, Word, and PowerPoint (and sometimes PlantUML). As you move up the abstraction ladder the tools become simpler. I define architectures that will deploy into 10-year lifespan applications (think military, medical, and automotive tier-1), and the code that implements it--or even the language used--has absolutely zero impact on the architecture. Mostly C and C++ (went through an Ada period, too), and some of it might even be implemented in Rust over the next few years as it matures into the automotive world, but when you're high enough up, the implementation is irrelevant. What matters are the building blocks, the apis, and most importantly, the encapsulation because that has an impact on the silicon, security, manufacturing, and test. Stuff that can be drawn and explained in a few slides, and not the code itself. (Of course, my lovely boxes have to be able to withstand upstream discoveries of flaws in the architecture, but that's the fun part!)
- dustbunny 1y agoTaking detailed notes in meetings, and keeping a record of what I'm doing/thinking about has allowed me to drastically shorten the "context switching time" between meetings and days. And having those notes is vital every once in a while, ie: X person said Y thing on Z date. Or It took me X days to do this thing, etc... doing this is a great way to be "management material" if that's what you wanna do. Because you are visibly very organized. I literally just write down everything important in meetings because it keeps me focused and I enjoy the act of hand writing. And then I keep notes in a giant endless .md file of what my goals are for the day. It's like 10 lines per day max.
- agcat 1y agoI agree. Documenting your thoughts, ideas on a notebook is one of the best ways that helps you think clearly.
- jwpapi 1y agoI see that point but now discussing approaches with AI replaces that most of the time, not because the AI is genius but because me formulating it helps me to think and me getting challenged helps as well (I ask for it) The input speed on keyboard is just way faster than with pen:/ Sometimes I still use notebook but it becomes less unfortunately. But my my challenges are just not challenging
- spidersouris 1y ago> me getting challenged helps as well (I ask for it) Can you elaborate? Do you have any examples of such interactions with LLMs?
- exiguus 1y agoFor me too. And i love this notebooks https://nuuna.com/notebooks https://nuuna.com/notebooks and this pens https://www.kaweco-pen.com/ https://www.kaweco-pen.com/ Around 2 notebooks and 1-2 pens and refills a year.
- WCSTombs 1y agoI used to be able to walk down to a local store and buy a Leuchtturm1917. Sadly, I believe they've all closed in the last few years. At least I can still order them online...
- roskelld 1y agoI find that using ways to step away from code help think things through in ways to overcome roadblocks. One recent trick I've found is rubber duck my issue into ChatGPT, which I used to do in a notepad (either digital or physical), the added advantage of ChatGPT is I can hit Enter once I'm done with my thoughts and get a response, which might have a solution in it.
- t1234s 1y agoWhat does one do when their handwriting gets worse and worse as the years go on due to constant keyboard use? Is there any way to get it back?
- chipsrafferty 1y agoAre you writing often?
- cameron_b 1y agoSummarizing some discussion here before: practice, and with a goal or example. Most notably - https://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-handwriting/ https://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-hand... Discussed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791049
- croisillon 1y agoThe wayback is called practicing, i think i told that story before but at 14 i basically started writing pages and pages of alphabets and numbers, working on individual signs and ligatures
- fallinditch 1y agoI highly recommend the Leuchturm 1917 A4 Master notebook with a dotted grid. Beautiful quality and a delight to use, especially with a good fountain pen. Yes A4 is quite big but has good advantages for inserting loose papers and the A4 real estate is a great size for user interface design.
- tanin 1y agoWith this kind of things, it's a personal productivity. You need to experiment and figure out what setting and process works best for you. Pen and paper are great because it forces you to think and design without going into too much details and being distracted. I find myself alternating between 2 modals: pen and paper vs. use Sublime Text to just write down some thoughts. Either seems to work well.
- backendEngineer 1y agomine is now gemma3-12b-qat local, come at me AI doomers
- CommenterPerson 1y agoAside, as a SQL data analyst working with undocumented or poorly documented dbs and business processes .. notes are a lifesaver. Important / obscure details are easily forgotten. I used to use paper but confess to now using OneNote (hate it and hate MS, but it works). The other place where typed up notes are extremely useful is with business users and meetings that go back and forth ending in confusion. A shared screen with minimal notes that the requester sees (and agrees) works wonders in bringing focus.
- appleaday1 1y agoMy most important tool is ChatGPT.
- bschwindHN 1y agoI love notebooks + erasable Frixion pens as an alternative to whiteboards. You can still get multiple colors the ability to erase, but you have a finer pen point for more accuracy and more permanence than a whiteboard (though I know you have to keep these notes away from heat as that's how they erase). It's especially useful for graphics/visual programming tasks.
- bryan2 1y agoI have only had bad experiences trying to write with those pens. I bought a note capturing system that used them and it was just awful.
- bschwindHN 1y agoLike actual Pilot Frixion pens, or something else? I know there's a hobby around nice pens and the frixion ones probably feel awful compared to those, but as a layperson when it comes to pens they seemed totally fine to work with.
- Quenby 1y ago[dead]
- fuzztester 1y agoI wonder if some people use personal wikis or mind maps (manual or via an app) for this area?
- lilerjee 1y agoIt's not important to write your ideas on physical or digital notebook, what matters is changing the environment and the activity. For example, I often ride a bicycle, about 10 hours at a time, sometimes I listened to music and thought about problems (most of the time I imagine what the product looks like, how to interact, what the process is, etc. This feels so amazing) while riding my bike, and recorded the results of my thinking in an resource manager(used as a note-taking app) I created. In this way, I solved many problems, made my brain clearer, and released the fatigue of the week.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 1y agoStylus and Samsung for me.
- notsydonia 1y agoLove this discussion. Changing font is fantastic for freshness, also spreadsheeting the more emotive/creative notes but handwriting the tech notes. Not always but to shift brain hemisphere (not a scientific concept but how it feels) or aid neuroplasticity.
- flembat 1y agoYou will find development much faster if you use a computer. Bad joke I know, when I was a kid I wrote out my programs on paper first and at the college you had to submit on paper so the county mainframe could run them and send back the results a week later... you can be much less careful about your thought process, when you get instant feedback.