[focusedone]

Wow, epic!

The most depressing thing is being presented with an issue and finding my name attached to a closed ticket from years before with no explanation of how I fixed it.

Guess what, current me, you're going to learn this again from scratch because past me was in a hurry and couldn't be bothered to type out what he did.

BSG - this has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

[belval]

I go through the same thing but with a few "popular" GitHub issues. Every time I encounter those bugs I Google it and the first result in my comment on the issue that explains the workaround I used.

That's probably how early Alzheimer feels.

[scruple]

I sometimes have to go back to GitHub issues I created, that I bookmarked for this specific reason.

I think that the Internet has modified how our brains retain information. I don't think this is an original idea, but I've observed that I'm real good at indexing where I saw some piece of information and very poor at storing the actual piece of information. I have to physically write things down to commit them to recallable memory.

[toast0]

Physically writing things has been a useful tool to increase recall for a long time. Taking notes in class may be more helpful than reviewing them later.

Certainly, quick access to information with a small search query helps tune our brains to get small search queries, but do some filing for a day or three and your brain will get tuned to quick recall there too. In the old days, you'd get real familiar with certain parts of books.

[wizofaus]

I suspect our brains have always been better at remembering meta-information than information itself. E.g. where you last saw an item of clothing vs the configuration of colours on it. In most cases this makes sense, and is essentially a space-saving trick, but there must be some point at which the meta-info becomes too inaccessible or too slow to utilise that remembering the full detail directly becomes worthwhile. Convincing your brain of that before it becomes too late can be a regular challenge with so much readily available externally stored information.

[the_af]

My favorite pattern is to go look for an answer in the StackExchange network, find myself nodding in agreement with one of the answers, then read the author... me, 10 years ago!