Note Taking

One of the most underrated skills in programming is note taking mastering this one skill will make you a better engineer and help save you a lot of time which you can then reutilize it for learning more skills. This article will try to capture the essence of effective note taking from a Developer perspective.

Why to take notes

while many developers are plagued with this question why note taking is relevant especially in this chatGPT era where you have both the powerful LLMS and the more traditional tools like Google search and Stack Overflow at your disposal to answer this I will clarify as to what do I mean by note taking in this context, in this article I am referring to make notes of contextual flow of code and note just copy pasting commands and code, and more over note taking also involves maintaining a repository of the issues which you have encountered and documenting them so that you can refer them later instead of reinventing the wheel.

How to take notes

when it comes to this there are many tools out there like Onenote, Notion, Evernote, Obsidian and so on, though I personally prefer Onenote due to its comparatively easier UI to navigate, quick search and simple notes section, all the note taking Apps work more or less the same so the focus should be more on the content rethaer than on the app which is used.

So lets dive deeper into how to effectively take notes for technical use cases, your notes should contain the following information:

• what topic is it about
• what is the issue you have faced
• what is the solution you have done to resolve the same

Logging your work

while note taking generally refers to the technical documentation it can also server a double purpose of logging your work which you can later use like your professional diary to get a list of your accomplishments later during the appraisal season. You can simply revisit the tickets you have worked and spin a good story on top of it as to how it has helped the team, organization this will help catapult your career.

Do share your thoughts in comments as what are your favorite tools/methods for note taking and how it has impacted your career.