9 ms·

Using an engineering notebook

341 points by evakhoury 8mo ago

albert_e 8mo ago
I use a physical notebook but not really an engeneering notebook as described here. I make notes while working and notes during meetings. Honestly most of it never gets read after a eay but I still do it. Very few of my colleagues carry a notebook around. Those who do are not seen taking notes too often.
- Terr_ 8mo ago
  Almost all my paper notes these days are write-only media. The benefit is not the artifact itself, but the immediate act of formalizing the idea, emphasizing its importance, and being mindful/attentive to what's going on.
  - rramadass 8mo ago
    Right. I am not sure why people have a hard time understanding this. You almost always remember more of what you have consciously written down by hand than by typing. You can write as little or as much as you see fit; the point is that the conscious involvement of "whole body and mind" in the act of writing enforces mental discipline, helps find inter-disciplinary patterns and in general, is an aid to thinking. Here is an article on the brain areas involved in writing; Psychologically speaking: your Brain on Writing - https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/blog/psychologically-speaking-your-brain-writing https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/blog/p... Finally, if you look at any of the great Scientists, almost all of them wrote prodigiously viz. Letters/Papers/Books/etc. I am quite convinced that this was one important factor in the development of their greatness. My personal role model for writing is of course Edsger Dijkstra :-)
woodruffw 8mo ago
I think this is great advice. One thing that I think is simultaneously trite and under-appreciated is the degree to which writing itself drives strong memory formation, even if the notes themselves aren’t particularly good or detailed. I’ve been keeping technical notebooks for about a decade now, and I’ve found that I can open up to almost any page and remember exactly what I was thinking when I scrawled on it. By contrast, things I write in Obsidian need much more context (i.e. detail) to remind me what I was thinking.
- rramadass 8mo ago
  > under-appreciated is the degree to which writing itself drives strong memory formation, even if the notes themselves aren’t particularly good or detailed. Exactly! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986532
nytesky 8mo ago
We have a strong culture of engineering notebooks in my org. I tried for a good 5 years — i carried one and probably filled up 5 of them. But i went back to them maybe 5 times in all those years. And the effort of writing actually distracts me more than the effortless action of typing. Plus the search and backup functions. Even in high school in the early 90s I typed up all my class notes because the act of transcribing my written scratch to typed notes cemented it in my memory — i remember the sensation of recalling something for a test by air typing. I guess with this history, its just how Ive trained myself so I carry laptop every where I go and type on that, but I al jealous of some of the well crafted and illustrated notes of some peers — especially the ones with multicolor pens for differentiation.
ElevenLathe 8mo ago
One thing that has helped me keep to start keeping long-running notebooks (which I use as engineering notebooks at times, among other things) is to actually keep two: one for immediate notes that I treat as disposable, and then another for "permanent" stuff. The former is a little 3x5 pocket notebook that literally lives in my pocket (or beside my keyboard), and I can jot stuff down in whatever order or format is convenient at the time. When I have a bit of time, I go through and "reconcile" the smaller notebook with the larger one (a regular composition book) by copying over the relevant information and indexing it. I then cross off the pages in the pocket notebook so I'll know I've dealt with them. (FWIW this is inspired by the bookkeeping practice of keeping a "wastebook" or "journal" that is just a list of transactions as they happen, and later "posting" or reconciling them into one's ledgers.) This has a couple benefits. First, you always get better work if you go through more than one draft. Second, the idea of something being in the "permanent" notebook forever can cause me to freeze up a bit, not wanting to "mess it up". Having a place where I can "stage" or draft my entries helps with this.
- kstrauser 8mo ago
  On a side note, whenever I get a new journal (paper or electronic), my very first step is to draw a crappy cover on the first page. That’s easy for my because I lack the skill to draw a nice one. This kinda “breaks the seal” for me. It’s slightly ugly now, causing me to not feel bad about anything else I put in it afterward.
  - ElevenLathe 8mo ago
    I actually use the first page to write a big "$100 Reward If Found" message with my phone number and a special email address. I've never lost it yet, but if I ever do and get it back for only $100 I'll consider it money well spent.
dizzant 8mo ago
In my research I take notes exactly as described here. I use plain-text files, one per week, with dated sections using markdown-ish notation where convenient. Display is never a goal; approximately 80-char column plaintext is the target format. I agree with other commenters here that typing gives me more flexibility, in particular when writing arguments. I’ll format each point as a bullet and rearrange the list until I’m satisfied with the flow. The notebook is essential for recovering tidbits learned along the way, e.g. what tricky steps did I need to get that one dependency to build. Weekly notepads are coarse enough to search by memory and contain enough context to get oriented quickly when going back several months.
joebates 8mo ago
I found a similar blog post like this years ago at the start of my career and started keeping a Rhodia Webnotebook A5. I've got over a dozen now from all my years of work. Nice for nostalgia
transitorykris 8mo ago
Surprised it’s not mentioned, but important for the sake of patents too
- bonsai_spool 8mo ago
  > Surprised it’s not mentioned, but important for the sake of patents too Is this still true these days? I thought the US moved to first-to-file in the early 2010s.
  - transitorykris 8mo ago
    It can still be important as a record of who was involved in the invention. Every inventor, no more or less, needs to be credited.
FrameworkFred 8mo ago
I've been using the "Zim desktop wiki" like this for years. I do recommend it as well...super handy to be able to go looking for my thoughts or snippets from 6 months ago. I can also use git to sync between my desktop and laptop because it's all text.
samgutentag 8mo ago
Just wanted to flag the use of the little "jump back to where I was reading" links on the footnotes is a feature I'll be implementing and using on every footnote I ever write for the rest of my life now. Thank you!
farhanhubble 8mo ago
I use Obsidian to record decisions, plan every day and take detailed notes. Very handy for recalling the nitty gritty for future reference be it performance reviews, writing blogs or updating my resume.
- foo42 8mo ago
  Same for me. I also make extensive use of adding links to anything relevant. Spent a bunch of time discussing something in a slack thread: link it. Read some documentation: link it. Had a chat with an llm in a chat window: link it. Writing notes about how a bunch of code works : link to the functions. For this last one I've registered a custom vim:// URL scheme on my system which lets me link to a symbol within a given file, and when clicked focuses the relevant tmux window and navigates the relevant vim instance (using named pipes) to the symbol, or opens a fresh one if not already open.
  - michaelanckaert 8mo ago
    I generally try to avoid adding external links as I found that those resources tend to get lost very fast. Of course, this is not always feasible, but whenever I can try to copy over the contents into my notes.
danpalmer 8mo ago
I was given this advice at university, but what I was always missing was what I was supposed to write down in them. The post here mentions hypotheses, but I don't do experiments for the most part. It mentions writing down in the notebook before writing code, but I can't test my notes, I can't really send my notes for code review. I guess you could use it for design, but you'd lose all the advantages of word processing such as editing, links, context, etc. I often have a scratch pad editor around with current working state in – that makes sense to me, but not on paper and that's not what's being proposed. I have also at times kept a logbook of what I've done, but it was very much an end of the day/week summary, not in the moment, not forward looking like this mentions. The idea sounds great, but what is actually being written down?
- pjot 8mo ago
  For me, it helps to slow down my thoughts and aides deep work. I draw diagrams, connect blurbs with arrows, and “link” to other page numbers.
  - danpalmer 8mo ago
    This is still missing the "what" for me. What do you write down about the work? Is it a plan for what you're about to work on? Is it a breakdown? Is it facts you learn as you work through something? Is it a minute by minute journal of what you've done? Is it just interesting details? Is it to-dos? Is it opinions you're trying to clarify? Diagrams I get, my desk is covered in scribbled diagrams to help me visualise something or communicate it to a colleague.
    - aylons 8mo ago
      Frankly, at the beginning? Anything you feel like. You can start, perhaps, with Just a title of what you're doing, pomodoros style. Maybe a note of something you thought but couldn't follow up on that moment. Diagrams are good. Much easier to think and much better and faster doing by hand. I always get distracted by the tool when I'm drawing in a computer. Even artist-modd I also make bullet points of general ideas that I'm trying to accomplish. Doodles. Important thing is, don't fret. Over time you'll find how it works for you.
Jabrov 8mo ago
I do the same thing, but with a Markdown file which I add a section to every day in a roughly append-only fashion
TheGRS 8mo ago
For my side projects I have a dev log and every day that I work on them I've gotten into the habit of writing "What I want to accomplish", "What I did", and "What's next", which all seems to capture my thoughts pretty well. I don't get super detailed on them, but I can look back at previous days to see what I should work on next and it helps me goal set better. Also helps me when I need to pause on my work for the day so I can pick it up later.
w10-1 8mo ago
I'd have a hard time with a physical notebook. Speed and search are key. My workspace is just a markdown file, with dates and work-in-progress (scripts, bug investigations, design notes, task lists...), by date (reversed), rolled up to month files. If something (non-code) bears remembering, it's normalized and published to others, or put into my own topic space (leaving the WIP notes). The key feature is global search over all such files. I can find any activity and any topic in seconds, with a search-bar overview of all places where I addressed some subject. (As a result I tend to create unique names.) As a discipline, speaking directly and constantly to future self does help establish more methodical approaches, reinforces context awareness (and avoid ratholes); I restart even small projects where I left off, and scale the number of projects I try. Somehow the act of writing provides a reflective time/instant boundary (think: clocks in a functional universe) that orients the work in time/relevance to avoid wasting time on things that matter less.
winddude 8mo ago
100% i've been using paper notebooks since I started coding
suds05 8mo ago
For me, this helps in getting clarity. I do it especially during meetings it helps me think criticallyb- talk just flows by otherwise.
wellf 8mo ago
Human journalctl. Probably a good habit to try. Especially with an LLM to search and aggregate it later.
LZ_Khan 8mo ago
I do this but instead in a google doc. Even better because I can use LLM's to query it aftewards.
wycx 8mo ago
I have settled on a way to do append only notes by having a "journal" user on my xmpp server, and I take notes by sending them asciidoc formatted messages. I have been too lazy to do it so far, but I could extract the messages from the server and compile them into something more easily browsed.
torginus 8mo ago
This is maybe a bit of a tangent to this article,but I've tried so many pieces of tech over the years to replace pen & paper notebooks, mainly iPads and eInk based notetaking devices, like the Remarkable. While I cannot find a concrete flaw with these things, with some of them working quite well, I just couldn't really get a feel for them - they always felt so tech-y and imprecise, that I always went back to an actual sheet of paper. Another product design misconception I think a lot of companies make is the use of metal cases - metal feels high-end and durable as opposed to plastic I suppose, and with it being quite solid, manufacturers can make it thinner and lighter. But it's uncomfortable to hold, and hard to manufacture complex shapes, which means these devices often end up in a case. Man I miss the 2000s when product design wasn't dead.
JetSetIlly 8mo ago
This is a timely article for me. I was consulting Joe Decuir's Engineering Notebooks just yesterday and wondered if these sorts of notebooks were a common thing or whether it was just Atari. Joe Decuir was an engineer at Atari and was involved with the development of the 2600. His notebooks can be useful references for the 2600, even to this day. https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977 https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977 https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1978 https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1978
- rramadass 8mo ago
  Nice! Thanks for posting this find.
- binarygit 8mo ago
  Looks like even Joe needed some time to adjust using an engineering notebook. He muses about how habits are difficult to change and that it might take him time to adjust to this notebook, and then goes on to wonder why this notebook was assigned and what kind of things he should document here.
crvdgc 8mo ago
How long before people realize that they too have limited context length and adopt: - memory/yyyy-mm-dd.md - MEMORY.md - SOUL.md
reeddev42 8mo ago
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thunspa 8mo ago
I've been doing this more and more over the past year, but I just write on plain white paper and throw it away after the stack on my desk gets too big. Like the author, I don't seem to ever need to read my old notes. Instead, it works wonders as a mental bucket of sorts and I've found paper to be extremely powerful for this. I tried doing this on a Surface Pro, for example, but it was significantly less enjoyable or effective. Now with LLMs helping me write code, planning ahead on paper is even more useful.
armcat 8mo ago
I’ve been doing this for the past 15 years - writing “LAZYs”, started off as just .txt files, now .md. The nice thing with it now you can search through it easily or give it to Codex
voidUpdate 8mo ago
Is an engineering notebook a specific kind of notebook? Google has a lot of results for "engineering notebook" but they seem to be all expensive fancy notebooks that have thin gridded paper
- hdjrudni 8mo ago
  From the article, > I'm not talking about a specific kind of paper notebook. So no. Just a regular old paper notebook. Any kind will do.
- uncivilized 8mo ago
  No. The author uses the term “engineering notebook” to make it sound different than what humans have already been doing for millennia.
genie3io 8mo ago
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hdjrudni 8mo ago
Interesting. I use a paper notebook to but it's the opposite of detailed. I use one when I have several ideas in my head and I need to get them out before I forget some, or when I need to figure something out that's a wee bit too complicated to keep all the bits and bobbles in my brain-RAM. But I write down just enough to offload the memory to paper. They're literal notes. Just enough so that I can remember what I was on about earlier. But probably not detailed enough I could come back in a couple months and recollect the rest of the details. What's the point in that anyway? These are things I intend to act on. Once I commit them to code, then the code becomes the source of truth.
- name_concept 8mo ago
  This is all very familiar. As I work on one task, supporting tasks reveal themselves and I like to write it all down. There is something about writing it vs. typing it, too. Often, I will write notes like "Figure out how to do X,Y,Z" and then I wake up in the middle of the night and the solution is right there.
skowalak 8mo ago
In case you want to take a look at it, the author has posted a photo of a page of her notebook on her mastodon. https://tietz.social/@nicole/116048644600363842 https://tietz.social/@nicole/116048644600363842
noughtnaut 8mo ago
I wonder if this sort of thing belings to a certain kind of organisation, or type of career. I can certainly see the value of "we have all of <brilliant engineer's> technical notes going back 43 years!" but in my experience, it's rare to meet a "brilliant engineer" who'll stay in one position for even a decade. Personally, I've been in many 2-15 year employments where I made copious notes - but I did so in whatever wiki my department was using. I've never had the opportinity (or, for that matter, much desire) to bring those notes with me to the next position, as they were (a) specific to that place or task, and (b) quite certainly proprietary (if far from high-value industrial secrets). Detailed notes on the inner workings of an in-house framework, or end-to-end credit card processing flow, just aren't that relevant when your next role is steward of a 25-year-old national tax reporting platform. I've done a few blog posts, but haven't generally felt the need to share my brilliant thoughts with the greater world, those were just my personal musings (as is this piece right here). Don't get me wrong, I'd love to _be_ in a position where such long-term usefulness was expected.
sesm 8mo ago
The big advantage of split keyboards is that a notebook fits nicely in-between the halves.
statusfailed 8mo ago
I didn't find note-taking particularly useful until I started keeping everything in a single notebook with dated pages. This worked a lot better than (for example) trying to organise notes by category - it's often easier to remember when you were working on something than how you categorised it, and once you know roughly when, you can find it by binary search
jon-wood 8mo ago
For the last 5 years or so I've been keeping daily journals, which have migrated from one piece of software to another over time. Ultimately they all boil down to Markdown files named `YYYY/MM/DD.md`, the format has evolved into me just throwing a timestamp in as a header and then typing whatever thoughts I have. These are useful for a couple of purposes, the first is simply getting thoughts out of my head and into a document. The other thing they've been good for is tracing back through what I've been doing - my job involves a lot of context switching, and it can be good (and sometimes also useful) to be able to scroll back through the last month and be reminded that I have in fact achieved something.
whytai 8mo ago
surprised to hear others don't do this! obsidian also works well for daily notes
9NRtKyP4 8mo ago
I don’t use a notebook and have done fine over the years - for those of you that are reading this and getting anxious you’re not doing your job the “right way”. I don’t have a particularly prodigious memory. I’ve sometimes thought there’s a value to forgetting. If it matters I’ll learn it through repetition, like compression almost. It always seemed like reconstructing things from first principles saves brain space and allows for generalisation and creativity.
- bodge5000 8mo ago
  Absolutely agree, I do use notebooks but like you say I dont think I need to at all, for some reason I just have some natural drive to write things down (plus I like notebooks). But I've often had experiences of reading through old notebooks and finding that the things I care about in there I instantly remembered without having to read the page, and the things I'd forgotten about I didn't care about anymore.
0x696C6961 8mo ago
I usually have a long running note per-project and whenever I need to context switch, I add a "Next Step: ..." line at the bottom of the doc. So I can jump right back in when I come back.
- Linux-Fan 8mo ago
  This is a powerful technique that has helped me a lot in the past as well, especially for those projects where I rarely progressed on (mostly private stuff, the work topics are more streamlined). Nowdays in my private projects I often use a combination of the git commit messages and comments left in the code to indicate where to continue. Of course, this is not useful for work, either. For work I like to use the ticket system and a separate text file and a paper notebook each to a slightly different effect. The text file is the log what was done and is done per day grouped by ticket, typically ~10 lines for a day. The notebook contains meeting notes, design thoughts, general notes etc. and is very verbose (often six or mor pages per day, A4 paper) but sometimes helps to identify how/why/when a given decision was taken. The ticket contains what might also benefit others such as technical insights, meeting summaries (derived and summarized after the meeting from the paper notebook), summaries of important (design or product) decisions etc.
Pinus 8mo ago
The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy, half-baked, wrong, turns out to be a false start, whatever. Once all that is fixed, what is left gets tidied up into some sort of digital form, usually program code. I don’t want all that mess in the capital-N Notebook, but it is hard to know when to switch from backs of envelopes to the Notebook. I suppose there might be a value in stopping right before the tidying-up stage (or perhaps right after it) and summarise the steps that led up to it (including abandoned approaches, and why) into some sort of document but that, for me, would be a digital file somewhere, not paper.
- bayindirh 8mo ago
  > use paper as a data processing medium I also do the same thing. > I don’t want all that mess in the capital-N Notebook, but it is hard to know when to switch from backs of envelopes to the Notebook. On the contrary, I want and enjoy recording my failures, false starts in these notebooks. These are important lessons. A culmination of "what not to do"s, or "Lessons Learnt" in NASA parlance. My engineering notebooks are my messy garages with working things on the workbench and not working things in a pile at the corner, recording how I think, what I think, and what works / what not. The code is the distilled version of what's working, the "second" prototype, and the polished product. Creation is messy, and there's no running away from that. Keeping the mess in its own place allows incubation of nice things and diving back into the same mess to find parts which works beautifully elsewhere. I prefer to embrace the suck and document it too.
- sota_pop 8mo ago
  I feel I could write a long response to every comment in this thread as notekeeping is something I consider critical. Knowing when to commit to “The capital-N Notebook” is something I’ve struggled with as well. What has been effective for me is to scribble daily on a marker/chalk/dry erase board and then transpose the final thought into “The Notebook” at the end of each day. This lets me format, err, mull, etc. and the final (sic clean) notebook still has enough granularity to retrace my thoughts in the med-to-long term.
madduci 8mo ago
Never used one in over 15 years. I write a short post it only if I don't finish a certain task between days and it is really complex or maybe as a to-do list before leaving for holidays. But I never felt the urgency to start a proper notebook. All the important decisions are documented in form of git commits for code or decision records for systems
eddyg 8mo ago
Obsidian with the (core) Daily Notes⁽¹⁾ plugin plus Jump-To-Date⁽²⁾ and Daily Note Navbar⁽³⁾ is a powerful combo for me. Everything is still searchable (or can be fed into an LLM) since it’s all Markdown text files behind the scenes. (And I can type my thoughts much faster than I can write.) ⁽¹⁾ https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes ⁽²⁾ https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date ⁽³⁾ https://github.com/karstenpedersen/obsidian-daily-note-navbar https://github.com/karstenpedersen/obsidian-daily-note-navba...
- bayindirh 8mo ago
  Writing with a pen and paper is different from typing on a keyboard at. brain level. I need to finish that research and write that blog post, apparently.
  - vonunov 8mo ago
    I suspect it's to do with fluency, at least partially. Have you looked into how it goes for very fluent typists? Problem is, I suspect you might get enough fluency that typing isn't distracting as compared to handwriting only at significantly faster speeds than most people consider the beginning of "fast".
    - bayindirh 8mo ago
      It's not about distraction, actually. Since the mode of typing vs. writing is different; I can feel that my brain is working differently. While I don't type lightning fast (~130WPM and beyond), I already type without thinking about it. I just think and it appears on screen, actually. On the other hand, when I'm writing, there's another sub-process which is evaluating whether what I'm writing makes sense or works in real world. It's not possible to do this while typing since the freedom provided by the pen, and the thinking process is completely different. Also, I can build a model of what I'm writing about in my mind better. In short, typing lends to shallower thinking while writing allows more depth and exploration on the subject. This is also evident when I'm writing code. I design it on paper, and type that design to the IDE I use. The research articles I started to collect also points to something similar. When using pen and paper, neurons fire differently and in larger networks, pointing to a different mode of thinking. Considering I started use pen/paper and keyboards almost at the same time, and able to verify that using a pen really makes my brain work differently, I find "you're typing it wrong" a flawed argument for the most part.
MonkeyClub 8mo ago
Within software engineering circles, the idea of the engineering notebook was reintroduced in Hunt and Thomas' The Pragmatic Programming, where (Topic 22) they call it an "engineering daybook". Personally, I've been using one form or another of journals and notebooks for over three decades. I did go through the "plain text is king" .txt phase, but, while search is useful, I always revert to a handwritten notebook. I find that I have a sort of visual memory of the location of a note or scribble, and can sort of easily find my way back to it "in the lower-right side of the page near the end of the notebook". Another meta-metric that's interesting to access and is lost when typing is the changing quality of my handwriting, and how it exhibits the underlying mental state. The notebooks/journals started from standard local composition books (B5) to narrower 14x21-ish cheap hardcovers. There's also dates (manual), titles or topic tags (manual), page numbers (manual), cross-references with arrows (which do stand out amongst the handwriting, e.g. -> p. 20, or -> C/20 to xref back to notebook C when you're on notebook E), indexes (also manual), earmarked pages, and a physical bookmark string. I've also reverted back to pencil, which I find more "quiet" a medium - I've been using Faber Castell's sleek TK4600 since elementary school, and it was quite interesting to return to it a couple of decades later. Plain text is still king nowadays, but it's also diagrammatic, and hyperlinked, the only difference being it is manual, and seems to assist immensely with the memory and personal internal coherence. I can write down a note to myself, working something out, and then return to it a couple of months later, cross-reference it and expand it, gradually reaching new understanding. No need for slip card boxes when you have a running log of your thoughts and works that can be referenced and cross-referenced, nor is there a need to limit the length of your text because of the medium - write a bullet list if you want, checkbox it, or a 200-word vignette, or just let loose over a few pages, it's all good: a plastic medium for a plastic mind. In all, for me journaling/notebooking is highly recommended. And for the younger folk who are keyboard-first, perhaps the deliberate slowness and scratchiness of this quaint medium will reveal a meditative quality.
JanisErdmanis 8mo ago
Tangentially, does anyone use a stamping device to put dates in their notebook? I am looking for something that sets the date and, preferably, the time automatically so that I have less friction keeping my notebook timestamped.
runamuck 8mo ago
I used to carry a physical notebook, but now I just Brain Dump to a (now giant and growing) Notepad++ Text file.
- acidburnNSA 8mo ago
  I used to do that but switched to Logseq and love it. Most people use obsidian.
- g8oz 8mo ago
  Especially powerful if that text file is a Markdown file. The sidebar TOC view then becomes a powerful navigation aid.
- lexoj 8mo ago
  Top of the file or end?
potro 8mo ago
Generally it is a good advise, I found similar things very useful for me. I think emphasis on paper and one notebook is wrong here and likely will fail quite a bit of people who will try it. Also prescriptions like "They're very detailed" (i.e. notes) are IMO too rigid. Start from wherever suit you, play, experiment and pay attention what works for you, adjust and iterate. Don't fixate on shiny concepts, i.e. "engineering notebook", and the "need" its records to be dated, etc. Try something, let it lapse. See if you are worse without it, then adopt it back. If you don't see the difference, so be it.
_lateralus_ 8mo ago
ive been suggesting this to my teammates for awhile. i use mine to track long term goals, walk myself through my status on my in progress work items to prep for standup, and take any quick notes when i learn something new or need to remember something like a due date or a point of contact for something. pretty cool looking back through my old ones as well since I've been doing it since I was an intern (ive got like 5 years of notebooks now XD)
kittbuilds 8mo ago
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JKCalhoun 8mo ago
I've done this continually—initially writing in spiral notebooks—since I started writing computer games 40 years ago. When at Apple, where it is probably widely known that there is an internal bug-tracking system called "Radar", a co-worker called my notebook style "John-dar" since I kept copious one-line to-do lists of issues still to resolve, tasks to tackle, etc. When all the circles next to each entry were filled in we could send the code to QA for integration testing. To this day I keep a Field Notes book in my (largish) wallet to take notes as I think of things on the go. (Long, boring drives seem to be the best times when these ideas come.) I am in the habit of scanning the Field Notes digitally as they fill up and are replaced. (I only lost one when I lost my whole wallet on a 7-day Katy Trail bike ride. Still stings—why no one contacted me about it since email and phone # were in the Field Notes book.) Sometimes it is fun to pick through older ideas, see ideas that I actually tackled and completed, other ideas that I am reminded of that may someday see the light of day…
- dhdaadhd 8mo ago
  Sounds like a great system! Would love to see photos if you have any!
- uncivilized 8mo ago
  What do you use to digitize your Field Notes? I was using EverNote but I’m looking for an alternative.
  - JKCalhoun 8mo ago
    Just a flatbed scanner.
    - uncivilized 8mo ago
      Thanks, but I mean do you use OCR or any service after scanning them? Would be nice to be able to search through the notebooks once scanned.
buescher 8mo ago
I increasingly use the rubber-ducking I do with an llm as a sort of engineering notebook or complement to one - I wish they had better search features.
jatora 8mo ago
Since when do even bloggers try to get Patreon subscribers?
simonw 8mo ago
> I'm talking about a practice of recording notes as you work on things, documenting what you're doing and why. I've been using GitHub Issues threads for this for a few years now, in both public and private repos. They work great for this. You can copy and paste code, images and references to code in repos to them, you can link them together, they offer useful API access, work on laptop and phone and are backed up by GitHub.
- alexpotato 8mo ago
  +1 on GitHub issues particularly as they now have: - parent and child relationships - the boolean search has gotten much better - the CLI version integrates well with Claude etc
clbrmbr 8mo ago
I keep a medium moleskine with the dots. Great for sketching UI designs or block diagrams. Dots are just enough guidance for technical drawing but not as distracting as lines. So much more respectful in meetings to use pen and notebook than to use a digital writing medium. Not sure why but that’s the vibe I feel.
recvonline 8mo ago
Based on this thread, I decided to implement my best take on an online engineering notebook: https://about.workledger.org/ https://about.workledger.org/ All local first. Happy to get some contributors :)
- reeeeee 8mo ago
  Did you one-shot this using an AI coding agent? If this was really just now created after reading this article and the comments, it's incredibly impressive.
  - recvonline 8mo ago
    Let's say.... 10 shot with Claude Code :) Initial app, then hand refined, Claude Code again...back and forth. Spend my morning doing it and it was fun. Very simple so far, want to clean it up and add more meaningful features. EDIT: Also, turns out the in-browser Editor landscape got GOOD the last few years apparently. It's really just plug and play. I remember 5 years I tried to do this and it was painful.
    - swah 8mo ago
      Crazy. Is it a library or ... ?
psanford 8mo ago
This "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it. I started keeping a work journal a few years ago and it has changed how I work for the better. It is just a text file. The main value of it is that I can search it! When I'm figuring something out for the first time, and I have a lot of trail and error, I write down what I did. And then I might not touch that thing again for 6 months. When I come back to it, it is unlikely that I will remember what I did exactly but because it is written down and searchable I can quickly recover my old state. I like this so much I also started a personal work journal for my home lab. It really is useful for me. But its primary value is that I can search it.
- helterskelter 8mo ago
  Writing things by hand leads to better retention, but if you can't remember it...yeah you'll have a fun time finding it again if you have a nontrivial amount of notes and haven't spent a significant amount of time indexing them. I guess you could OCR them. Best of both worlds.
  - thyristan 8mo ago
    You can't OCR handwriting. There are some AIs that do claim handwriting recognition, but I've yet to find a single one that can read my notes.
    - helterskelter 8mo ago
      Yeah I was talking about Google Vision or similar. Though USPS has been doing handwriting recognition since the 80's. I don't it got very good until the late 90's though.
      - yencabulator 8mo ago
        > Though USPS has been doing handwriting recognition since the 80's. On a very restricted dictionary of possible content, with a pool of people employed to fix anything where the computer is unsure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c
speedbird 8mo ago
This was definitely something I picked up from science education. Basically a technical journal. These days I split between technical notes a write and store on the project git so others and the AI tools can read - eg architecture decision records, bug reports etc and then a separate personal linear time journal of what I’m doing / thinking/ task lists meeting notes etc, often with links to the project specific docs. Great for searching. What I miss from paper is ability to quickly sketch diagrams.
tug2024 8mo ago
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rustyhancock 8mo ago
The patreon plug for the image really tickled me. Not because it's wrong per se but it's such an irrevant image of text. Has the author used electronic notes then he wouldn't be paying the bandwidth to show me a photo of the screen of his eink device!
renato_shira 8mo ago
[flagged]
nunez 8mo ago
I'm a simple man. I see a post about the reMarkable; I comment. Buying this damn thing has been a life-changer. I could never get on with physical notebooks, as I always lost them and searching for stuff was a chore. It's an amazing companion for keeping track of everything I've written down, especially with the newest update that can _actually_ search handwritten content (instead of content that was typed, which previous versions were restricted to). I especially appreciate the reMarkable team for sticking to their position of making the reMarkable a notetaking only device, even when it's inconvenient. The reMarkable has been ESPECIALLY helpful for tracking my workouts. I've powerlifted for a long time and have experienced the rise and fall (or subscription-laden feature bloat and enshittification, more like) of The Apps™ (JEFIT, Strong, Hevy). More specifically, I like to leave my phone at home when I visit the gym, and none of these apps have provided a good experience on the Apple Watch. Tracking my workouts on paper became increasingly attractive over the years; maintaining a small mountain of notebooks was not. The reMarkable completely and elegantly solved this problem. I have a template I developed two years ago that works for my programs, and moving that data into a Google Sheet (whenever I get around to it) should be easy (though it's a lot of data, so it will take a long time).
contingencies 8mo ago
Personally I use loose leaf A4 pages, colored pens (massively useful!) and a padfolio with magnetic clip. When a bunch of notes are done, I'll staple them together and file them. I date stuff exactly or approximately or thematically group it. Then they go in boxed document folders (my context is insane, I work on mechanical/electrical/software/patents/random projects at the same time). Periodically, like changing countries, I scan stuff, digitize it, shred and purge. Closed notebooks barely work because unless you're working on something highly sequential you wind up with 100 notebooks each of which have 5-15 pages used and are mostly wasted. Occasionally, dated notes can be critical in IP litigation.
agentultra 8mo ago
I use one too! In fact, I use several. I have a series of journals for graphics programming. One for proof kernels. A series for projects... if I'm working on a program that takes me longer than a few hours to realize I keep notes, plans, etc. Great practice!
gwbas1c 8mo ago
About a year and a half ago we started writing end-of-day status reports at my job. They include what we did, and what we're going to do the next day. I started really relying on the "what I'm going to do tomorrow" to remember where I start!
Traster 8mo ago
This can be an incredibly powerful tool. It does so many things - it forces you to write down what you're doing. If you actually do that, it's just a great opportunity to think "Hey hang on, is this thing I'm doing actually solving the problem I have" and "Actually is this the most useful thing I could be doing" in an explicit way. Another thing that the author doesn't really mention but actually is really useful for some of us is to go back and read what you've done to (a) not feel like you've been wasting your time doing nothing, and (b) to realise where you were going wrong on this line of reasoning earlier. Personally I think this is a really useful time to be revisiting the concept because this is how a lot AI tools work. They're language models so the way they get to complexity is through writing out plans step by step and running commands and then interpreting them, you can read your session with an AI agent like claude code as their engineering notebook.

341 points by evakhoury 8mo ago

I use a physical notebook but not really an engeneering notebook as described here. I make notes while working and notes during meetings. Honestly most of it never gets read after a eay but I still do it. Very few of my colleagues carry a notebook around. Those who do are not seen taking notes too often.

Terr_ 8mo ago
Almost all my paper notes these days are write-only media. The benefit is not the artifact itself, but the immediate act of formalizing the idea, emphasizing its importance, and being mindful/attentive to what's going on.
- rramadass 8mo ago
  Right. I am not sure why people have a hard time understanding this. You almost always remember more of what you have consciously written down by hand than by typing. You can write as little or as much as you see fit; the point is that the conscious involvement of "whole body and mind" in the act of writing enforces mental discipline, helps find inter-disciplinary patterns and in general, is an aid to thinking. Here is an article on the brain areas involved in writing; Psychologically speaking: your Brain on Writing - https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/blog/psychologically-speaking-your-brain-writing https://uwaterloo.ca/writing-and-communication-centre/blog/p... Finally, if you look at any of the great Scientists, almost all of them wrote prodigiously viz. Letters/Papers/Books/etc. I am quite convinced that this was one important factor in the development of their greatness. My personal role model for writing is of course Edsger Dijkstra :-)

woodruffw 8mo ago

I think this is great advice. One thing that I think is simultaneously trite and under-appreciated is the degree to which writing itself drives strong memory formation, even if the notes themselves aren’t particularly good or detailed. I’ve been keeping technical notebooks for about a decade now, and I’ve found that I can open up to almost any page and remember exactly what I was thinking when I scrawled on it. By contrast, things I write in Obsidian need much more context (i.e. detail) to remind me what I was thinking.

rramadass 8mo ago
> under-appreciated is the degree to which writing itself drives strong memory formation, even if the notes themselves aren’t particularly good or detailed. Exactly! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46986532

nytesky 8mo ago

We have a strong culture of engineering notebooks in my org. I tried for a good 5 years — i carried one and probably filled up 5 of them. But i went back to them maybe 5 times in all those years. And the effort of writing actually distracts me more than the effortless action of typing. Plus the search and backup functions. Even in high school in the early 90s I typed up all my class notes because the act of transcribing my written scratch to typed notes cemented it in my memory — i remember the sensation of recalling something for a test by air typing. I guess with this history, its just how Ive trained myself so I carry laptop every where I go and type on that, but I al jealous of some of the well crafted and illustrated notes of some peers — especially the ones with multicolor pens for differentiation.

ElevenLathe 8mo ago

One thing that has helped me keep to start keeping long-running notebooks (which I use as engineering notebooks at times, among other things) is to actually keep two: one for immediate notes that I treat as disposable, and then another for "permanent" stuff. The former is a little 3x5 pocket notebook that literally lives in my pocket (or beside my keyboard), and I can jot stuff down in whatever order or format is convenient at the time. When I have a bit of time, I go through and "reconcile" the smaller notebook with the larger one (a regular composition book) by copying over the relevant information and indexing it. I then cross off the pages in the pocket notebook so I'll know I've dealt with them. (FWIW this is inspired by the bookkeeping practice of keeping a "wastebook" or "journal" that is just a list of transactions as they happen, and later "posting" or reconciling them into one's ledgers.) This has a couple benefits. First, you always get better work if you go through more than one draft. Second, the idea of something being in the "permanent" notebook forever can cause me to freeze up a bit, not wanting to "mess it up". Having a place where I can "stage" or draft my entries helps with this.

kstrauser 8mo ago
On a side note, whenever I get a new journal (paper or electronic), my very first step is to draw a crappy cover on the first page. That’s easy for my because I lack the skill to draw a nice one. This kinda “breaks the seal” for me. It’s slightly ugly now, causing me to not feel bad about anything else I put in it afterward.
- ElevenLathe 8mo ago
  I actually use the first page to write a big "$100 Reward If Found" message with my phone number and a special email address. I've never lost it yet, but if I ever do and get it back for only $100 I'll consider it money well spent.

dizzant 8mo ago

In my research I take notes exactly as described here. I use plain-text files, one per week, with dated sections using markdown-ish notation where convenient. Display is never a goal; approximately 80-char column plaintext is the target format. I agree with other commenters here that typing gives me more flexibility, in particular when writing arguments. I’ll format each point as a bullet and rearrange the list until I’m satisfied with the flow. The notebook is essential for recovering tidbits learned along the way, e.g. what tricky steps did I need to get that one dependency to build. Weekly notepads are coarse enough to search by memory and contain enough context to get oriented quickly when going back several months.

joebates 8mo ago

I found a similar blog post like this years ago at the start of my career and started keeping a Rhodia Webnotebook A5. I've got over a dozen now from all my years of work. Nice for nostalgia

transitorykris 8mo ago

Surprised it’s not mentioned, but important for the sake of patents too

bonsai_spool 8mo ago
> Surprised it’s not mentioned, but important for the sake of patents too Is this still true these days? I thought the US moved to first-to-file in the early 2010s.
- transitorykris 8mo ago
  It can still be important as a record of who was involved in the invention. Every inventor, no more or less, needs to be credited.

FrameworkFred 8mo ago

I've been using the "Zim desktop wiki" like this for years. I do recommend it as well...super handy to be able to go looking for my thoughts or snippets from 6 months ago. I can also use git to sync between my desktop and laptop because it's all text.

samgutentag 8mo ago

Just wanted to flag the use of the little "jump back to where I was reading" links on the footnotes is a feature I'll be implementing and using on every footnote I ever write for the rest of my life now. Thank you!

farhanhubble 8mo ago

I use Obsidian to record decisions, plan every day and take detailed notes. Very handy for recalling the nitty gritty for future reference be it performance reviews, writing blogs or updating my resume.

foo42 8mo ago
Same for me. I also make extensive use of adding links to anything relevant. Spent a bunch of time discussing something in a slack thread: link it. Read some documentation: link it. Had a chat with an llm in a chat window: link it. Writing notes about how a bunch of code works : link to the functions. For this last one I've registered a custom vim:// URL scheme on my system which lets me link to a symbol within a given file, and when clicked focuses the relevant tmux window and navigates the relevant vim instance (using named pipes) to the symbol, or opens a fresh one if not already open.
- michaelanckaert 8mo ago
  I generally try to avoid adding external links as I found that those resources tend to get lost very fast. Of course, this is not always feasible, but whenever I can try to copy over the contents into my notes.

danpalmer 8mo ago

I was given this advice at university, but what I was always missing was what I was supposed to write down in them. The post here mentions hypotheses, but I don't do experiments for the most part. It mentions writing down in the notebook before writing code, but I can't test my notes, I can't really send my notes for code review. I guess you could use it for design, but you'd lose all the advantages of word processing such as editing, links, context, etc. I often have a scratch pad editor around with current working state in – that makes sense to me, but not on paper and that's not what's being proposed. I have also at times kept a logbook of what I've done, but it was very much an end of the day/week summary, not in the moment, not forward looking like this mentions. The idea sounds great, but what is actually being written down?

pjot 8mo ago
For me, it helps to slow down my thoughts and aides deep work. I draw diagrams, connect blurbs with arrows, and “link” to other page numbers.
- danpalmer 8mo ago
  This is still missing the "what" for me. What do you write down about the work? Is it a plan for what you're about to work on? Is it a breakdown? Is it facts you learn as you work through something? Is it a minute by minute journal of what you've done? Is it just interesting details? Is it to-dos? Is it opinions you're trying to clarify? Diagrams I get, my desk is covered in scribbled diagrams to help me visualise something or communicate it to a colleague.
  - aylons 8mo ago
    Frankly, at the beginning? Anything you feel like. You can start, perhaps, with Just a title of what you're doing, pomodoros style. Maybe a note of something you thought but couldn't follow up on that moment. Diagrams are good. Much easier to think and much better and faster doing by hand. I always get distracted by the tool when I'm drawing in a computer. Even artist-modd I also make bullet points of general ideas that I'm trying to accomplish. Doodles. Important thing is, don't fret. Over time you'll find how it works for you.

Jabrov 8mo ago

I do the same thing, but with a Markdown file which I add a section to every day in a roughly append-only fashion

TheGRS 8mo ago

For my side projects I have a dev log and every day that I work on them I've gotten into the habit of writing "What I want to accomplish", "What I did", and "What's next", which all seems to capture my thoughts pretty well. I don't get super detailed on them, but I can look back at previous days to see what I should work on next and it helps me goal set better. Also helps me when I need to pause on my work for the day so I can pick it up later.

w10-1 8mo ago

I'd have a hard time with a physical notebook. Speed and search are key. My workspace is just a markdown file, with dates and work-in-progress (scripts, bug investigations, design notes, task lists...), by date (reversed), rolled up to month files. If something (non-code) bears remembering, it's normalized and published to others, or put into my own topic space (leaving the WIP notes). The key feature is global search over all such files. I can find any activity and any topic in seconds, with a search-bar overview of all places where I addressed some subject. (As a result I tend to create unique names.) As a discipline, speaking directly and constantly to future self does help establish more methodical approaches, reinforces context awareness (and avoid ratholes); I restart even small projects where I left off, and scale the number of projects I try. Somehow the act of writing provides a reflective time/instant boundary (think: clocks in a functional universe) that orients the work in time/relevance to avoid wasting time on things that matter less.

winddude 8mo ago

100% i've been using paper notebooks since I started coding

suds05 8mo ago

For me, this helps in getting clarity. I do it especially during meetings it helps me think criticallyb- talk just flows by otherwise.

wellf 8mo ago

Human journalctl. Probably a good habit to try. Especially with an LLM to search and aggregate it later.

LZ_Khan 8mo ago

I do this but instead in a google doc. Even better because I can use LLM's to query it aftewards.

wycx 8mo ago

I have settled on a way to do append only notes by having a "journal" user on my xmpp server, and I take notes by sending them asciidoc formatted messages. I have been too lazy to do it so far, but I could extract the messages from the server and compile them into something more easily browsed.

torginus 8mo ago

This is maybe a bit of a tangent to this article,but I've tried so many pieces of tech over the years to replace pen & paper notebooks, mainly iPads and eInk based notetaking devices, like the Remarkable. While I cannot find a concrete flaw with these things, with some of them working quite well, I just couldn't really get a feel for them - they always felt so tech-y and imprecise, that I always went back to an actual sheet of paper. Another product design misconception I think a lot of companies make is the use of metal cases - metal feels high-end and durable as opposed to plastic I suppose, and with it being quite solid, manufacturers can make it thinner and lighter. But it's uncomfortable to hold, and hard to manufacture complex shapes, which means these devices often end up in a case. Man I miss the 2000s when product design wasn't dead.

JetSetIlly 8mo ago

This is a timely article for me. I was consulting Joe Decuir's Engineering Notebooks just yesterday and wondered if these sorts of notebooks were a common thing or whether it was just Atari. Joe Decuir was an engineer at Atari and was involved with the development of the 2600. His notebooks can be useful references for the 2600, even to this day. https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977 https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977 https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1978 https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1978

rramadass 8mo ago
Nice! Thanks for posting this find.
binarygit 8mo ago
Looks like even Joe needed some time to adjust using an engineering notebook. He muses about how habits are difficult to change and that it might take him time to adjust to this notebook, and then goes on to wonder why this notebook was assigned and what kind of things he should document here.

crvdgc 8mo ago

How long before people realize that they too have limited context length and adopt: - memory/yyyy-mm-dd.md - MEMORY.md - SOUL.md

reeddev42 8mo ago

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thunspa 8mo ago

I've been doing this more and more over the past year, but I just write on plain white paper and throw it away after the stack on my desk gets too big. Like the author, I don't seem to ever need to read my old notes. Instead, it works wonders as a mental bucket of sorts and I've found paper to be extremely powerful for this. I tried doing this on a Surface Pro, for example, but it was significantly less enjoyable or effective. Now with LLMs helping me write code, planning ahead on paper is even more useful.

armcat 8mo ago

I’ve been doing this for the past 15 years - writing “LAZYs”, started off as just .txt files, now .md. The nice thing with it now you can search through it easily or give it to Codex

voidUpdate 8mo ago

Is an engineering notebook a specific kind of notebook? Google has a lot of results for "engineering notebook" but they seem to be all expensive fancy notebooks that have thin gridded paper

hdjrudni 8mo ago
From the article, > I'm not talking about a specific kind of paper notebook. So no. Just a regular old paper notebook. Any kind will do.
uncivilized 8mo ago
No. The author uses the term “engineering notebook” to make it sound different than what humans have already been doing for millennia.

genie3io 8mo ago

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hdjrudni 8mo ago

Interesting. I use a paper notebook to but it's the opposite of detailed. I use one when I have several ideas in my head and I need to get them out before I forget some, or when I need to figure something out that's a wee bit too complicated to keep all the bits and bobbles in my brain-RAM. But I write down just enough to offload the memory to paper. They're literal notes. Just enough so that I can remember what I was on about earlier. But probably not detailed enough I could come back in a couple months and recollect the rest of the details. What's the point in that anyway? These are things I intend to act on. Once I commit them to code, then the code becomes the source of truth.

name_concept 8mo ago
This is all very familiar. As I work on one task, supporting tasks reveal themselves and I like to write it all down. There is something about writing it vs. typing it, too. Often, I will write notes like "Figure out how to do X,Y,Z" and then I wake up in the middle of the night and the solution is right there.

skowalak 8mo ago

In case you want to take a look at it, the author has posted a photo of a page of her notebook on her mastodon. https://tietz.social/@nicole/116048644600363842 https://tietz.social/@nicole/116048644600363842

noughtnaut 8mo ago

I wonder if this sort of thing belings to a certain kind of organisation, or type of career. I can certainly see the value of "we have all of <brilliant engineer's> technical notes going back 43 years!" but in my experience, it's rare to meet a "brilliant engineer" who'll stay in one position for even a decade. Personally, I've been in many 2-15 year employments where I made copious notes - but I did so in whatever wiki my department was using. I've never had the opportinity (or, for that matter, much desire) to bring those notes with me to the next position, as they were (a) specific to that place or task, and (b) quite certainly proprietary (if far from high-value industrial secrets). Detailed notes on the inner workings of an in-house framework, or end-to-end credit card processing flow, just aren't that relevant when your next role is steward of a 25-year-old national tax reporting platform. I've done a few blog posts, but haven't generally felt the need to share my brilliant thoughts with the greater world, those were just my personal musings (as is this piece right here). Don't get me wrong, I'd love to _be_ in a position where such long-term usefulness was expected.

sesm 8mo ago

The big advantage of split keyboards is that a notebook fits nicely in-between the halves.

statusfailed 8mo ago

I didn't find note-taking particularly useful until I started keeping everything in a single notebook with dated pages. This worked a lot better than (for example) trying to organise notes by category - it's often easier to remember when you were working on something than how you categorised it, and once you know roughly when, you can find it by binary search

jon-wood 8mo ago

For the last 5 years or so I've been keeping daily journals, which have migrated from one piece of software to another over time. Ultimately they all boil down to Markdown files named `YYYY/MM/DD.md`, the format has evolved into me just throwing a timestamp in as a header and then typing whatever thoughts I have. These are useful for a couple of purposes, the first is simply getting thoughts out of my head and into a document. The other thing they've been good for is tracing back through what I've been doing - my job involves a lot of context switching, and it can be good (and sometimes also useful) to be able to scroll back through the last month and be reminded that I have in fact achieved something.

whytai 8mo ago

surprised to hear others don't do this! obsidian also works well for daily notes

9NRtKyP4 8mo ago

I don’t use a notebook and have done fine over the years - for those of you that are reading this and getting anxious you’re not doing your job the “right way”. I don’t have a particularly prodigious memory. I’ve sometimes thought there’s a value to forgetting. If it matters I’ll learn it through repetition, like compression almost. It always seemed like reconstructing things from first principles saves brain space and allows for generalisation and creativity.

bodge5000 8mo ago
Absolutely agree, I do use notebooks but like you say I dont think I need to at all, for some reason I just have some natural drive to write things down (plus I like notebooks). But I've often had experiences of reading through old notebooks and finding that the things I care about in there I instantly remembered without having to read the page, and the things I'd forgotten about I didn't care about anymore.

0x696C6961 8mo ago

I usually have a long running note per-project and whenever I need to context switch, I add a "Next Step: ..." line at the bottom of the doc. So I can jump right back in when I come back.

Linux-Fan 8mo ago
This is a powerful technique that has helped me a lot in the past as well, especially for those projects where I rarely progressed on (mostly private stuff, the work topics are more streamlined). Nowdays in my private projects I often use a combination of the git commit messages and comments left in the code to indicate where to continue. Of course, this is not useful for work, either. For work I like to use the ticket system and a separate text file and a paper notebook each to a slightly different effect. The text file is the log what was done and is done per day grouped by ticket, typically ~10 lines for a day. The notebook contains meeting notes, design thoughts, general notes etc. and is very verbose (often six or mor pages per day, A4 paper) but sometimes helps to identify how/why/when a given decision was taken. The ticket contains what might also benefit others such as technical insights, meeting summaries (derived and summarized after the meeting from the paper notebook), summaries of important (design or product) decisions etc.

Pinus 8mo ago

The problem I always run into when I try something like this, is that I mostly (there are exceptions) use paper as a data processing medium (as opposed to a data recording medium). Most of what I do on paper is messy, half-baked, wrong, turns out to be a false start, whatever. Once all that is fixed, what is left gets tidied up into some sort of digital form, usually program code. I don’t want all that mess in the capital-N Notebook, but it is hard to know when to switch from backs of envelopes to the Notebook. I suppose there might be a value in stopping right before the tidying-up stage (or perhaps right after it) and summarise the steps that led up to it (including abandoned approaches, and why) into some sort of document but that, for me, would be a digital file somewhere, not paper.

bayindirh 8mo ago
> use paper as a data processing medium I also do the same thing. > I don’t want all that mess in the capital-N Notebook, but it is hard to know when to switch from backs of envelopes to the Notebook. On the contrary, I want and enjoy recording my failures, false starts in these notebooks. These are important lessons. A culmination of "what not to do"s, or "Lessons Learnt" in NASA parlance. My engineering notebooks are my messy garages with working things on the workbench and not working things in a pile at the corner, recording how I think, what I think, and what works / what not. The code is the distilled version of what's working, the "second" prototype, and the polished product. Creation is messy, and there's no running away from that. Keeping the mess in its own place allows incubation of nice things and diving back into the same mess to find parts which works beautifully elsewhere. I prefer to embrace the suck and document it too.
sota_pop 8mo ago
I feel I could write a long response to every comment in this thread as notekeeping is something I consider critical. Knowing when to commit to “The capital-N Notebook” is something I’ve struggled with as well. What has been effective for me is to scribble daily on a marker/chalk/dry erase board and then transpose the final thought into “The Notebook” at the end of each day. This lets me format, err, mull, etc. and the final (sic clean) notebook still has enough granularity to retrace my thoughts in the med-to-long term.

madduci 8mo ago

Never used one in over 15 years. I write a short post it only if I don't finish a certain task between days and it is really complex or maybe as a to-do list before leaving for holidays. But I never felt the urgency to start a proper notebook. All the important decisions are documented in form of git commits for code or decision records for systems

eddyg 8mo ago

Obsidian with the (core) Daily Notes⁽¹⁾ plugin plus Jump-To-Date⁽²⁾ and Daily Note Navbar⁽³⁾ is a powerful combo for me. Everything is still searchable (or can be fed into an LLM) since it’s all Markdown text files behind the scenes. (And I can type my thoughts much faster than I can write.) ⁽¹⁾ https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes ⁽²⁾ https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date ⁽³⁾ https://github.com/karstenpedersen/obsidian-daily-note-navbar https://github.com/karstenpedersen/obsidian-daily-note-navba...

bayindirh 8mo ago
Writing with a pen and paper is different from typing on a keyboard at. brain level. I need to finish that research and write that blog post, apparently.
- vonunov 8mo ago
  I suspect it's to do with fluency, at least partially. Have you looked into how it goes for very fluent typists? Problem is, I suspect you might get enough fluency that typing isn't distracting as compared to handwriting only at significantly faster speeds than most people consider the beginning of "fast".
  - bayindirh 8mo ago
    It's not about distraction, actually. Since the mode of typing vs. writing is different; I can feel that my brain is working differently. While I don't type lightning fast (~130WPM and beyond), I already type without thinking about it. I just think and it appears on screen, actually. On the other hand, when I'm writing, there's another sub-process which is evaluating whether what I'm writing makes sense or works in real world. It's not possible to do this while typing since the freedom provided by the pen, and the thinking process is completely different. Also, I can build a model of what I'm writing about in my mind better. In short, typing lends to shallower thinking while writing allows more depth and exploration on the subject. This is also evident when I'm writing code. I design it on paper, and type that design to the IDE I use. The research articles I started to collect also points to something similar. When using pen and paper, neurons fire differently and in larger networks, pointing to a different mode of thinking. Considering I started use pen/paper and keyboards almost at the same time, and able to verify that using a pen really makes my brain work differently, I find "you're typing it wrong" a flawed argument for the most part.

MonkeyClub 8mo ago

Within software engineering circles, the idea of the engineering notebook was reintroduced in Hunt and Thomas' The Pragmatic Programming, where (Topic 22) they call it an "engineering daybook". Personally, I've been using one form or another of journals and notebooks for over three decades. I did go through the "plain text is king" .txt phase, but, while search is useful, I always revert to a handwritten notebook. I find that I have a sort of visual memory of the location of a note or scribble, and can sort of easily find my way back to it "in the lower-right side of the page near the end of the notebook". Another meta-metric that's interesting to access and is lost when typing is the changing quality of my handwriting, and how it exhibits the underlying mental state. The notebooks/journals started from standard local composition books (B5) to narrower 14x21-ish cheap hardcovers. There's also dates (manual), titles or topic tags (manual), page numbers (manual), cross-references with arrows (which do stand out amongst the handwriting, e.g. -> p. 20, or -> C/20 to xref back to notebook C when you're on notebook E), indexes (also manual), earmarked pages, and a physical bookmark string. I've also reverted back to pencil, which I find more "quiet" a medium - I've been using Faber Castell's sleek TK4600 since elementary school, and it was quite interesting to return to it a couple of decades later. Plain text is still king nowadays, but it's also diagrammatic, and hyperlinked, the only difference being it is manual, and seems to assist immensely with the memory and personal internal coherence. I can write down a note to myself, working something out, and then return to it a couple of months later, cross-reference it and expand it, gradually reaching new understanding. No need for slip card boxes when you have a running log of your thoughts and works that can be referenced and cross-referenced, nor is there a need to limit the length of your text because of the medium - write a bullet list if you want, checkbox it, or a 200-word vignette, or just let loose over a few pages, it's all good: a plastic medium for a plastic mind. In all, for me journaling/notebooking is highly recommended. And for the younger folk who are keyboard-first, perhaps the deliberate slowness and scratchiness of this quaint medium will reveal a meditative quality.

JanisErdmanis 8mo ago

Tangentially, does anyone use a stamping device to put dates in their notebook? I am looking for something that sets the date and, preferably, the time automatically so that I have less friction keeping my notebook timestamped.

runamuck 8mo ago

I used to carry a physical notebook, but now I just Brain Dump to a (now giant and growing) Notepad++ Text file.

acidburnNSA 8mo ago
I used to do that but switched to Logseq and love it. Most people use obsidian.
g8oz 8mo ago
Especially powerful if that text file is a Markdown file. The sidebar TOC view then becomes a powerful navigation aid.
lexoj 8mo ago
Top of the file or end?

potro 8mo ago

Generally it is a good advise, I found similar things very useful for me. I think emphasis on paper and one notebook is wrong here and likely will fail quite a bit of people who will try it. Also prescriptions like "They're very detailed" (i.e. notes) are IMO too rigid. Start from wherever suit you, play, experiment and pay attention what works for you, adjust and iterate. Don't fixate on shiny concepts, i.e. "engineering notebook", and the "need" its records to be dated, etc. Try something, let it lapse. See if you are worse without it, then adopt it back. If you don't see the difference, so be it.

_lateralus_ 8mo ago

ive been suggesting this to my teammates for awhile. i use mine to track long term goals, walk myself through my status on my in progress work items to prep for standup, and take any quick notes when i learn something new or need to remember something like a due date or a point of contact for something. pretty cool looking back through my old ones as well since I've been doing it since I was an intern (ive got like 5 years of notebooks now XD)

kittbuilds 8mo ago

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JKCalhoun 8mo ago

I've done this continually—initially writing in spiral notebooks—since I started writing computer games 40 years ago. When at Apple, where it is probably widely known that there is an internal bug-tracking system called "Radar", a co-worker called my notebook style "John-dar" since I kept copious one-line to-do lists of issues still to resolve, tasks to tackle, etc. When all the circles next to each entry were filled in we could send the code to QA for integration testing. To this day I keep a Field Notes book in my (largish) wallet to take notes as I think of things on the go. (Long, boring drives seem to be the best times when these ideas come.) I am in the habit of scanning the Field Notes digitally as they fill up and are replaced. (I only lost one when I lost my whole wallet on a 7-day Katy Trail bike ride. Still stings—why no one contacted me about it since email and phone # were in the Field Notes book.) Sometimes it is fun to pick through older ideas, see ideas that I actually tackled and completed, other ideas that I am reminded of that may someday see the light of day…

dhdaadhd 8mo ago
Sounds like a great system! Would love to see photos if you have any!
uncivilized 8mo ago
What do you use to digitize your Field Notes? I was using EverNote but I’m looking for an alternative.
- JKCalhoun 8mo ago
  Just a flatbed scanner.
  - uncivilized 8mo ago
    Thanks, but I mean do you use OCR or any service after scanning them? Would be nice to be able to search through the notebooks once scanned.

buescher 8mo ago

I increasingly use the rubber-ducking I do with an llm as a sort of engineering notebook or complement to one - I wish they had better search features.

jatora 8mo ago

Since when do even bloggers try to get Patreon subscribers?

simonw 8mo ago

> I'm talking about a practice of recording notes as you work on things, documenting what you're doing and why. I've been using GitHub Issues threads for this for a few years now, in both public and private repos. They work great for this. You can copy and paste code, images and references to code in repos to them, you can link them together, they offer useful API access, work on laptop and phone and are backed up by GitHub.

alexpotato 8mo ago
+1 on GitHub issues particularly as they now have: - parent and child relationships - the boolean search has gotten much better - the CLI version integrates well with Claude etc

clbrmbr 8mo ago

I keep a medium moleskine with the dots. Great for sketching UI designs or block diagrams. Dots are just enough guidance for technical drawing but not as distracting as lines. So much more respectful in meetings to use pen and notebook than to use a digital writing medium. Not sure why but that’s the vibe I feel.

recvonline 8mo ago

Based on this thread, I decided to implement my best take on an online engineering notebook: https://about.workledger.org/ https://about.workledger.org/ All local first. Happy to get some contributors :)

reeeeee 8mo ago
Did you one-shot this using an AI coding agent? If this was really just now created after reading this article and the comments, it's incredibly impressive.
- recvonline 8mo ago
  Let's say.... 10 shot with Claude Code :) Initial app, then hand refined, Claude Code again...back and forth. Spend my morning doing it and it was fun. Very simple so far, want to clean it up and add more meaningful features. EDIT: Also, turns out the in-browser Editor landscape got GOOD the last few years apparently. It's really just plug and play. I remember 5 years I tried to do this and it was painful.
  - swah 8mo ago
    Crazy. Is it a library or ... ?

psanford 8mo ago

This "it has to be handwritten" stuff is nonsense. Do that if you enjoy it, but also you should acknowledge the downsides to it. I started keeping a work journal a few years ago and it has changed how I work for the better. It is just a text file. The main value of it is that I can search it! When I'm figuring something out for the first time, and I have a lot of trail and error, I write down what I did. And then I might not touch that thing again for 6 months. When I come back to it, it is unlikely that I will remember what I did exactly but because it is written down and searchable I can quickly recover my old state. I like this so much I also started a personal work journal for my home lab. It really is useful for me. But its primary value is that I can search it.

helterskelter 8mo ago
Writing things by hand leads to better retention, but if you can't remember it...yeah you'll have a fun time finding it again if you have a nontrivial amount of notes and haven't spent a significant amount of time indexing them. I guess you could OCR them. Best of both worlds.
- thyristan 8mo ago
  You can't OCR handwriting. There are some AIs that do claim handwriting recognition, but I've yet to find a single one that can read my notes.
  - helterskelter 8mo ago
    Yeah I was talking about Google Vision or similar. Though USPS has been doing handwriting recognition since the 80's. I don't it got very good until the late 90's though.
    - yencabulator 8mo ago
      > Though USPS has been doing handwriting recognition since the 80's. On a very restricted dictionary of possible content, with a pool of people employed to fix anything where the computer is unsure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxCha4Kez9c

speedbird 8mo ago

This was definitely something I picked up from science education. Basically a technical journal. These days I split between technical notes a write and store on the project git so others and the AI tools can read - eg architecture decision records, bug reports etc and then a separate personal linear time journal of what I’m doing / thinking/ task lists meeting notes etc, often with links to the project specific docs. Great for searching. What I miss from paper is ability to quickly sketch diagrams.

tug2024 8mo ago

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rustyhancock 8mo ago

The patreon plug for the image really tickled me. Not because it's wrong per se but it's such an irrevant image of text. Has the author used electronic notes then he wouldn't be paying the bandwidth to show me a photo of the screen of his eink device!

renato_shira 8mo ago

[flagged]

nunez 8mo ago

I'm a simple man. I see a post about the reMarkable; I comment. Buying this damn thing has been a life-changer. I could never get on with physical notebooks, as I always lost them and searching for stuff was a chore. It's an amazing companion for keeping track of everything I've written down, especially with the newest update that can _actually_ search handwritten content (instead of content that was typed, which previous versions were restricted to). I especially appreciate the reMarkable team for sticking to their position of making the reMarkable a notetaking only device, even when it's inconvenient. The reMarkable has been ESPECIALLY helpful for tracking my workouts. I've powerlifted for a long time and have experienced the rise and fall (or subscription-laden feature bloat and enshittification, more like) of The Apps™ (JEFIT, Strong, Hevy). More specifically, I like to leave my phone at home when I visit the gym, and none of these apps have provided a good experience on the Apple Watch. Tracking my workouts on paper became increasingly attractive over the years; maintaining a small mountain of notebooks was not. The reMarkable completely and elegantly solved this problem. I have a template I developed two years ago that works for my programs, and moving that data into a Google Sheet (whenever I get around to it) should be easy (though it's a lot of data, so it will take a long time).

contingencies 8mo ago

Personally I use loose leaf A4 pages, colored pens (massively useful!) and a padfolio with magnetic clip. When a bunch of notes are done, I'll staple them together and file them. I date stuff exactly or approximately or thematically group it. Then they go in boxed document folders (my context is insane, I work on mechanical/electrical/software/patents/random projects at the same time). Periodically, like changing countries, I scan stuff, digitize it, shred and purge. Closed notebooks barely work because unless you're working on something highly sequential you wind up with 100 notebooks each of which have 5-15 pages used and are mostly wasted. Occasionally, dated notes can be critical in IP litigation.

agentultra 8mo ago

I use one too! In fact, I use several. I have a series of journals for graphics programming. One for proof kernels. A series for projects... if I'm working on a program that takes me longer than a few hours to realize I keep notes, plans, etc. Great practice!

gwbas1c 8mo ago

About a year and a half ago we started writing end-of-day status reports at my job. They include what we did, and what we're going to do the next day. I started really relying on the "what I'm going to do tomorrow" to remember where I start!

Traster 8mo ago

This can be an incredibly powerful tool. It does so many things - it forces you to write down what you're doing. If you actually do that, it's just a great opportunity to think "Hey hang on, is this thing I'm doing actually solving the problem I have" and "Actually is this the most useful thing I could be doing" in an explicit way. Another thing that the author doesn't really mention but actually is really useful for some of us is to go back and read what you've done to (a) not feel like you've been wasting your time doing nothing, and (b) to realise where you were going wrong on this line of reasoning earlier. Personally I think this is a really useful time to be revisiting the concept because this is how a lot AI tools work. They're language models so the way they get to complexity is through writing out plans step by step and running commands and then interpreting them, you can read your session with an AI agent like claude code as their engineering notebook.