(A) Paper notebooks, good quality and largish (10x12 inch) acid-free artists sketch books. I use these for notes, designs and so forth. When I approach a new body of code, I'll make class diagrams and make reverse-engineering type notes; the "muscle memory" of writing seems to help with my understanding and recall. These are also good for cartooning when I'm frustrated. :-)
(B) A single large file containing a daily log of "interesting" stuff, such as what I've done, hard-won knowledge about systems (including bugs), descriptions of personal interactions and so on. Sometimes I won't make an entry for a day or two, some days I add dozens or hundreds of lines. I have a shell command that can append a single line to the log, and another one that opens the file and appends a timestamped entry, whereupon I can write a few lines, paste-in a bit of email, etc.
The log file is real handy at review time. I also find myself grepping it for obscure things, like "How did I set five servers up to find that bug last summer?"
I have these two habits going back 25 years or so, and it's quite interesting to revisit my decisions ("No! God, don't do /that/!" :-) ) and day-to-day issues.
Comments
I keep two things:
(A) Paper notebooks, good quality and largish (10x12 inch) acid-free artists sketch books. I use these for notes, designs and so forth. When I approach a new body of code, I'll make class diagrams and make reverse-engineering type notes; the "muscle memory" of writing seems to help with my understanding and recall. These are also good for cartooning when I'm frustrated. :-)
(B) A single large file containing a daily log of "interesting" stuff, such as what I've done, hard-won knowledge about systems (including bugs), descriptions of personal interactions and so on. Sometimes I won't make an entry for a day or two, some days I add dozens or hundreds of lines. I have a shell command that can append a single line to the log, and another one that opens the file and appends a timestamped entry, whereupon I can write a few lines, paste-in a bit of email, etc.
The log file is real handy at review time. I also find myself grepping it for obscure things, like "How did I set five servers up to find that bug last summer?"
I have these two habits going back 25 years or so, and it's quite interesting to revisit my decisions ("No! God, don't do /that/!" :-) ) and day-to-day issues.
(B) Sounds a bit like a spark file:
http://lifehacker.com/5941997/defrag-your-brain-with-a-spark...
(there are better links than this one but it's the only one I can find that isn't blocked by my corporate firewall)