(Brief background: I'm a recent college grad, and have been working as a software engineer for ~4 months.)

In college, my note-taking approach was primarily focussed around quickly capturing and synthesizing knowledge as it was delivered during lecture. The structure of my notes followed the curriculum, and I was able to use pen and paper which I've found really helps me focus. Projects rarely taught new material that would need to be injected into my notes later, mostly they just reinforced concepts already on paper with concrete examples.

On the job when learning a new concept, I'm struggling to find a way to take hand-written notes in a way that is expandable and will be useful tomorrow and in a week, much less in 6 months.

I'm now learning chef+ruby to add some manpower to our devops team, but as I learn things from a variety of sources I'm unable to keep my hand-written notes from becoming a mess. As I begin to grasp the bigger picture there's a lot of detail I want to go back and add to my initial understandings of these systems.

Taking hand-written notes and then integrating into a digital notebook is something I'm considering. I don't relish the idea of re-typing hand-written notes, but it might help comprehension. The hassle of diagraming in digital notebooks is my biggest concern.

Have you found any good methodologies for taking hand-written notes that is expandable as you learn better mental models of the basics, as well as new information on the subject?