How do you document what you are learning at work?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11036577

by seeyes • 10 years ago

6 12 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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?

davelnewton2• 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.

davelnewton2• 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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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/

SkyRocknRoll• 10 years ago

I use gist.github.com

How do you document what you are learning at work?

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