Discussion on: How I Approach Notetaking as a Developer

I have several thoughts that don't have a coherent through-line, so I'll proceed and hope coherence comes.

One of the concepts in David Allen's Getting Things Done is using external memory. In fact, that's the only part that stuck, and I'm eternally grateful. I've found that taking notes by hand helps them "stick", which I credit to years of pre-computer education, but follows your NPR link.

Regarding code comments, I'm torn. Jeff Atwood suggests writing better code instead of comments, and I'm not 100% on board, I lean toward the "why" while leaving the "how" to code. I might do something more like this:

# writes a random color in hexidecimal RGB format to STDOUT
def createColor
  hexadecimalIntegers = ["0","1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9","a","b","c","d","e","f"] 
  color = hexadecimalIntegers.sample(6).join("")
  "Your new hex color is ##{color}" 
end

Also, I didn't know about array.sample() but quite like it. I'm going to have to implement it in languages I use. rand, in the languages I know, would involve aligning output to array size, casting as integer and making the index, so using sample is the clear choice, once you know it exists.

But I agree on note taking and "whatever works for you". Thank you for writing this.