[rrgok]

I don't take notes at all, I just use Notepad++ as temporary clipboard for big copy/pastes or edit before paste. I'm really curious to see what the notes looks like for these heavy note taker with hundred of pages/notes. I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables all day.

I'm a software engineer. My thinking process gets better as I develop and implement things. I cannot write notes and then implement. There were times when I wished I took notes/planned before implementing, but nothing to make me regret. It is just more refactor and time consuming to rewrite things.

I feel like note taking is overrated and trendy like AI/ML (like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion). I wish someone can mentor me to takes notes and make understand the value of it. And I read a lot of blog post about it.

[wainstead]

> I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables

I started keeping a “log” back in 1999 just for work (I too am a software engineer). I note what I worked on and/or what problems I was trying to solve and/or what solutions I found. And some personal stuff too.

My inspiration is the idea of the scientist’s lab book where “if you didn’t write it down it didn’t happen.”

Countless times — even this past week - it has proven invaluable when I wanted to look up how I solved something before (“how do we generate those CSP headers on the fly?” “How did I mount that Docker container?”) or when no one knows why something was built a certain way (and I noted the date and time a manager made that decision).

After a few years I wind up with a few novels worth of entries (by volume) so it’s amazing how writing a little each day adds up.

As to format, it started as a .txt file in Emacs but has evolved into a moderately simple org-mode file.

[FinnKuhn]

If I understand this correctly you could almost describe your note taking as writing a personal documentation

[wainstead]

I guess you could describe it that way, but it reads more like a journal.

[gofreddygo]

> I wish someone can mentor me to takes notes and make understand the value of it.

Here's how I look at it. My programming notes have 2 purposes. #1 to keep me on track. #2 for a concrete log of events. I then rewind, playback and observe what and how I was thinking (almost like debugging by reading logs).

#1 helps with focus. I waste way too much time trying new and shiny libraries, reading articles, etc without making progress on the task at hand. If I simply focus on the task, I don't learn new things. This helps me find interesting tools, libs etc. and come back to them later. Also helps to organize important things first.

#2 Helps me find patterns. In the type of work I do, how I approach them, what I was thinking yesterday, how I debugged something 2 months ago. It has made me an overall better, or at least it gave me a feeling that I was getting better. Both are worth the effort.

So when you start, you will either overdo or underdo note taking. Both ends make the resulting notes less useful (usually called "waste"). Getting it right is a matter of knowing which end you are starting, make changes, see results and repeat till you see no improvement.

[type0]

My philosophy that one should make note taking system as effortless as possibly, once you over-engineer it becomes a chore