Ask HN: How do you track what you learn?

7 points by pipu 10 years ago | 9 comments

I would like to know your recommendation for a tool to track what you've learned this day/week/month etc.

Some sort of a service where you could easily write notes about the stuff you came accross while developing something.

For instance if I find a very useful link that shows me the correct way to do something, I would like to write that down somewhere with a simple explanation using my own words.

arrmn 10 years ago |

A few weeks ago there was a post[0][1] on hn from a guy who wrote a daily til for a whole year.

I stole his idea[1] and created jekyll blog on Github, I can just create a new .md file and put the things for the til down. With the new upload feature from github you can also just write the md file locally and just drop it in.

I like it so far, just need to get in the habit of writing it down daily.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11068902 [1] https://github.com/jbranchaud/til [2] http://arminmsg.github.io/blog/til/ http://arminmsg.github.io/blog/til/

hanniabu 10 years ago | |

How do you keep all the markdown files organized and easily searchable? Or do you never reference back to them after you've taken the notes?

jacobsims 10 years ago | | |

I also started something similar at https://jacobsims.github.io/til/ -- to search them you can just use GitHub search, which is available in that top bar. I also spent a bit more effort creating category pages that look like fancy little tags (due to limits of Jekyll, I can't paginate them, but it will work for a while anyway).

arrmn 10 years ago | | |

I do plan to reference back to the notes or else they would be meaningless. My current solution is to add categories to the posts and the use jekyll to generate a page where I create a headline for each category and link to all related posts there. This may not be the final solution, it was thrown together one evening so there's improvement.

I don't know how this will scale since I just started this project.

kennyfrc 10 years ago |

Apart from keeping track, a related problem I'm facing is making sure that I am able to re-implement what I'm doing.

So what I do is the following:

1. I break down what I've learned into steps or checklists

2. I then put these into Scrivener

3. Each topic that I've learned has it's own page

Here's a small example from my notes around PDF generation + attachments in Rails. This is just the overall picture -- each bullet point expands to another bunch of notes which has actual code details.

* build a mailer with mail(to:, from: content:)

* build a controller what delivers that content

* the controller should render a notice that says that the post has been successfully created <via a respond_to method>

* make sure that you configure the SMTP settings

* build a pdf creator (PrawnPDF::Base) => this initializes a PDF w/ some view_context

* configure a MIME type within config/initializers

* configure a controller that triggers a respond_to for this

* add a button that links to think Printable receipt

* save the PDF into some foldere

* insert a paperclip file type into the migration

* add this intot he user model

* go back to the PDF / order controller and then add a custom path to save the PDF (pdf.render file…)

* then save that file inside teh database & set it to the certificate

hanniabu 10 years ago |

I usually just keep notes in plain text files and save the likes in an organized bookmark directory of folders so I can easily find relevant links. I do like what the other commenter suggested about the markdown files on github though, but I'm not sure what the best way to navigate those would be.

julio-r 10 years ago |

I generally use Google Keep that syncs between my devices, but I'm not completely happy with it.

zwetan 10 years ago |

personally I use a local wiki to keep notes, links, research etc.

https://github.com/gollum/gollum