Discover, Notate, Repeat = A Dev's Diary

Ok...I got a little inspiration this morning so I'm going to write a little article. :)

Anyone who's worked with me for any length of time can tell you, I'm a little forgetful about things. Having a long and varied career doesn't help because there's a lot of data to sift through in my brain and I am definitely due for an upgrade in my processor.

Because of this, I tend to take notes a lot...however, I'm also not great at labeling my notes so sometimes I'll have notepad open and just be dumping random stuff in there for days. A lot of the time I only need it for momentarily copying something off my clipboard or something like that while I'm working on complex code, but sometimes I fix something and think to myself "Hey, that could be useful to others as well" so I write a note down along with the sea of other unimportant data that's already in there.

It's a bad habit that I've been working on breaking for a long time. I do a couple different things to combat this.

One is by using some sort of documentation platform like OneNote or Confluence...something like that. Those type of apps make it really easy to quickly write down a note about something and categorize it. I now have a pretty decent size collection of coding tips and tricks and yesterday it paid off in spades! One of my teammates bumped into a problem that I had solved about a week previously...and as per usual I wrote a note down about it in notepad along with a bunch of other junk...however this time I stopped and scanned through the open notepad and took some time to create OneNote pages out of all the important stuff I had in there...and bam, it fulfilled its purpose and helped solve my teammates problem. If that's not some instant validation for giving some extra effort, then I don't know what is.

The other thing I do is on a Friday or the day before a vacation, I will go over any scrap notepad text files I have and make OneNote pages out of any note I took, which I can remember what it was for, if it's important. Like I said, there's usually a large amount of junk in my notes. But by doing this, if I have a really eventful few days and come back to work and don't exactly remember everything I encountered before I left...I have some well documented and categorized notes to fall back on.

Every time, as soon as I see my notes I keep in OneNote, I pretty much instantly remember what it applies to. And sometimes reviewing old notes is kinda fun like opening a time capsule...I will say though that the notes I kept about Kendo from 2017 really don't apply too much anymore...I can probably delete those. ;)

The point I'm trying to get at is unless you have a photographic memory and can categorize and recall everything you ever see or do, I think most folks can and do forget things. Get yourself into the habit of keeping notes about the important stuff that you think can help others.

Being able to help others is key in the collaborative coding world that we software developers are in. Taking some extra time to document a quick solution to configuring a tool, or maybe a cool logic trick, or perhaps some complex piece of code, etc... anything like that. Trust me, it will play a part in progressing our software development ecosystem as a whole...it may be a small part, but those pieces all add up over time. :)