Struggeling Dev Takes Notes

Why and how I take notes.

At work I often have to switch tasks. I try to minimize task switches, but they happen. On my side projects, more often than not, quite some time passes before I can pick them up again.
In both cases, adopting the habit of taking notes has helped me to be more efficient and lose less time getting back up to speed.

Tools

I like to take Markdown notes. The format is simple, but expressive enough. The notes are still readable with a simple text editor. To most satisfying setup for me is Jetbrains CLion.

Why

• Reproducibility: for others or for yourself
• Knowledge Base/Saving Time: I sometimes encounter the same error some time later. You always meet twice in life, this also applies to errors. There've been numerous times where I encountered an error and knew that I had fixed it before. A short search for the error message over my notes has saved me time so many times.;)
• Start where you've left off: I switch tasks quite often at work - although I try to minimize it as much as I can. Taking notes helps me to get back into the flow faster. And even if I can avoid task switching, there's always the next day, or Mondays. Side note: Speaking of next day. One thing I changed doing over time was stopping in the middle of tasks. You know the "I'll just finish this and then I'll quit for the day.". I stopped doing this. It's much easier for me to resume a task I left unfinished the day before. I gives me some momentum for the new day and I can often start the day by completing a task. This point is even more important for me in my side projects. Sometimes multiple weeks pass, before I resume working on some project.
• Bonus: You already have a rough blog post.

How

Markdown

• readable and writable with every text editor
• easy syntax for enough basic formatting
• Styleable (CSS)
• comparable (Source Control)
• "extensions" for math, sequence diagrams - purists might not like this

Editor

• I currently use the Markdown plugin for CLion and PyCharm. It's nice to only have one application.
• Bear
• Checkout Visual Studio Code

Alternatives

• For Python: Jupyter (which is also Markdown)
• Commit Messages: severely limited formatting
• Simple RFC-style text files, also done this. But especially for GameDev it's nice to be able to embed images
• HTML
• Word, ...

In the end it doesn't matter, what ever is feature-rich enough for the use case and easy enough so that taking notes doesn't distract from the actual work.