How do you document what you are learning at work?

6 points by seeyes 10 years ago | 12 comments

We run a whole bunch of micro-services at work and I keep discovering things about them when I am reading through the code, fixing bugs, runbooks or whatever else. Right now, I have a note for every service and I keep appending to that. Evernote has some serious issues - no versioning, easy to totally delete the note (no warning). How do you all keep track of all the incremental learning?

drl42 10 years ago |

Mindmaps, with notes. Allows you to organize the information in a visual hierarchy, so that you can quickly refer back to the notes. I use Freemind[1], an open source tool.

[1] - http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

e19293001 10 years ago |

If you're using emacs you can use org-mode for note taking. Plus, there are lots of benefits wherein you can organize everything just in plain text.

Some of the previous discussions about org-mode:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2423276

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8668271

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2091850

From org-mode website: Org mode is for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system.

http://orgmode.org/

theGREENsuit 10 years ago |

I use OneNote. I have a Notebook for each project I'm on, with tabs to keep my notes organized. My small team, 3 people, has a shared OneNote Notebook to allow collaboration. At my previous employer, we used Atlassian's Confluence.

kat 10 years ago |

I have a few text files at work that I keep track of things. I treat it more as a reference file/personal FAQ file, some notes are verbose and some are terse. When I am learning on a side project I keep my notes in Google docs. I take the time to format those notes better so I can study them easily. Google Docs has history and warns you when you delete a file. What do you use versioning for? I correct my notes when I discover they are wrong, and if we release a new version of the product, I just record the new behaviour in addition to the old behaviour (along with dates, build numbers etc)

atmosx 10 years ago |

I'm using tiddlywiki and I must say it's doing an amazing job. It doesn't stand on the way, works via mobile, everything is fine so far. I am slowly transitioning from Evernote. However if someone doesn't pick-it-up it will probably cease[1] by the end of 2016.

[1] http://osmo-service.tiddlyspace.com/ServiceUpdate20160112

davelnewton 10 years ago |

Wiki, that way other people can contribute as they learn incrementally.

Wiki gardening is a thing, though, and without it, doom will follow.

At my last job we did the same thing, but I heavily customized the wiki to include endpoint testing, DB access, context-sensitive autocomplete, etc. It was pretty cool.

seeyes 10 years ago | |

I use wiki for stuff the team would care about. But asking this for personal use. For eg, there might be some git commands that I learned that I want to write down, everyone else may not really care about it/ may already know it.

davelnewton 10 years ago | | |

Same answer; wiki, with customization for search.

Lately I use nvAlt, and now I may switch to Quiver (OS X), for a lot of that. I might even switch to Dash (of which there are Linux variants) after I explore its snippets and note-taking capabilities.

ApolloRising 10 years ago |

I found Evernote was the easiest way to always have it around.

afarrell 10 years ago |

A directory of markdown files. I use git for version control.

tugberkk 10 years ago |

I just write them to text files and usually lose them.

SkyRocknRoll 10 years ago |

I use gist.github.com