Why taking notes

• to memorize things you've just read and think it may help in the future.
• to reference back to an idea or solution that may solve your current problem you're dealing with.

Disadvantages of some common note-taking app

• Limited features: They are not free. Service like Evernote with free tier allow to sync only 2 devices, small upload size. You have to pay for extra convenience.
• Time-consuming:
  • these note-taking services are usually shipped with a native app while as software developers you're likely to read and learn from a blog or a Youtube video instead of a book. Admit it, navigating between the browser and the app waste your time. You may choose the browser version of the app but it doesn't usually perform well like the experience I have with web-based OneNote.
  • many of note-taking apps on the market follow the "two-column" structure in which the left column is a list of items and the right one is the note section of a specific item. The thing that makes your notes less organized is that this layout is one-dimensional, notes are taken one by one, line by line then you have to do 'linear search' when you need to find it.

Why do I use Google Sheets ?

• It's free. No limited devices, get your notes in any device within your Google account. No need to install native app and the web-based application performs well.
• it has 2d layout allowing you to create sub-sections in the main note section. Each time I want trace back a note, just find which sub-section it lies in to reduce search time.
• I use Google Sheets to store reference links to other tutorials or official docs and keep each note as brief as possible. It saves time when I reference to other people's verified, reliable and detailed blogs/posts instead of writing your own notes.

The way I use it

• In my sheets, each sheet serves a topic like BackEnd, Frontend and DistributedSystem.
• In each topic, I divide it into sub-activities like Docs/Lessons (for official docs, fundamental concepts or general guide on a subject), Tasks (for a specific task - I did in day like: deal with timezone aware in Django, implement feature X but failed) and Misc to store any note that don't fall into two former sections.
• For each cell (corresponding to a single note), I may attach a link directing to a stackoverflow question or to a blog post so that I easily trace back to a note as long as I remember the note title, its topic and when it's written.
• This layout give me ability to write a dozen of notes in a single row. Each row for each day. Each note belongs to a specific sub-section. In a single window, the sheet is packed with approx. 7x22 note items. You won't need to scroll up/down too much to find a specific note -> Saving time.

Conclusion

While some argue that writing your own notes makes you keep longer memorization, I believe that we should our notes as brief as possible and we learn by doing rather than trying to remember a thing by writing a wall of text.
I think it's much more efficient to save a link and read other's note.
Google Sheets fit perfectly this philosophy therefore I strongly recommend to you guys who's looking for a note-taking app.