I was given this advice at university, but what I was always missing was what I was supposed to write down in them.

The post here mentions hypotheses, but I don't do experiments for the most part. It mentions writing down in the notebook before writing code, but I can't test my notes, I can't really send my notes for code review. I guess you could use it for design, but you'd lose all the advantages of word processing such as editing, links, context, etc.

I often have a scratch pad editor around with current working state in – that makes sense to me, but not on paper and that's not what's being proposed. I have also at times kept a logbook of what I've done, but it was very much an end of the day/week summary, not in the moment, not forward looking like this mentions.

The idea sounds great, but what is actually being written down?

I'm a scientist. In the science world, the traditional lab notebook contained a narrative of what you were doing. You're kind of thinking out loud into it.

One measure of a good notebook is if it contains sufficient information that you don't have to repeat work only because you can't figure out what you did. There are other good reasons for repeating things of course.

My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her meticulous notebooks. She was telling me just last week that one of her experiments produced a puzzling result. The next day she said: "I figured it out from my notebook. I skipped a step that was in the procedure."

There was a time when a notebook was also a legal document, and so there was a criterion of whether it would stand up in court as proof that you had invented something. Could a "person skilled in the art" replicate your work based on your notebook? My dad told me that his notebooks were regularly reviewed and witnessed.

The legal issues have changed, since the patent system has switched to the "first to file" rule. My employer got rid of its formal notebook policy when this change came through.

My problem with physical notebooks is that a great deal of my work is computational, and I automate things. In my case, the best form for recording my work is in fact a Jupyter notebook. On the other hand, I come from a family of chemists, and taking electronic notes in a "wet" chemistry lab is often impractical.

I picked up bullet journaling a few years back and that’s how I track my work:

o Sales meeting with Foo Corp

- Suggested to Sam that we use PostgreSQL

- Made us $X by doing $Y (star drawing)

. Fix a thing

/ In the process of fixing a thing

X Done fixing the thing

And that’s about it. I write this in an epaper notebook (Supernote Nomad) that I take everywhere in the office. At a glance I can tell you what I’m working on, what I did, and who I told what. And when I’m writing my annual self-review, I can search it for the star drawings to know what I can brag about.

I specifically do this instead of an iPad because I found it vastly less distracting during meetings. I tend to leave it laying there while I look at the speakers and pay attention, rather than just checking Slack really quickly, and oh, better look at my email, etc.

This is salve for my ADHD-scalded mind.

I don't have a full-blown notebook, but I keep task notes in individual text files. A sample text might be:

- Fixing broken test: (full ci link)

- seems to be repo foo, target //bar:baz, subtest TestSomethingNice. Error: (30 lines of stack trace here)

- git checkout 0ead3f820da34812089

- trying locally: bazel test //bar:baz

- command failed, error: (relevant error here)

- turns out I need to set a config, reference: (wiki link here)

- trying: bazel test --config=green //bar:baz

- problem reproduces 5 times in a row, seems like 100% fail rate

- source file location: source/bar/baz.cc

- theory: baz is broken from recent dependency bump. Reverting commit 987afd

- result: the error is different now (more error text)

etc.. etc...

This is actually super handy for a complex problem. No need to wonder "did I see the error before?" or "wait, when I was trying that thing, did I see that message as well?" or "how do I reproduce a bug again?". No keeping dozens of tabs open so you can copy a few words from each of them. When later talking to someone, you can refer to your notes.

> It mentions writing down in the notebook before writing code, but I can't test my notes, I can't really send my notes for code review.

I think generally it's more about sketching the high level structure of the code. I will routinely write things like :

  documents = ...
  by_client = documents.group_by(client)
  for client, doc_set in by_client:
     for doc in doc_set: csv.write(doc)

The above is very simple, of course, usually I'm working through something where I just want to play through what pieces of data I might or might be missing

For me, it helps to slow down my thoughts and aides deep work. I draw diagrams, connect blurbs with arrows, and “link” to other page numbers.