[rustypotato]

I hand-write a work journal. Just an A5 notebook and a few pens of different colors. Definitely an essential piece of my dev toolkit. I've especially come to love the free-form nature of hand-writing, which allows me to visualize more of my thoughts than a digital text editor.

The journal has served two main purposes. One, I can write and annotate free-form pseudocode at exactly the level of abstraction I need without getting distracted by the errors produced by the code editor. It's really helped me work through the difficult parts of coding puzzles before I ever touch the keyboard to implement.

Two, I have a scientific notebook for debugging. I write down a hypothesis, design a small experiment, document the steps and complications as I go, and write down what the actual result was; then repeat the cycle. Putting it all in writing keeps it straight so I don't chase my tail, and I have something to look back on if I need to explain the bug and how it was solved to my coworkers.

[waxaxiom]

Can you tell me more about the scientific notebook? Does it have a specific layout or is it just another notebook you use for debugging?