What's your advice on note taking

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Hi!

For those who have finished one or more freecodecamp certifications. Did you take notes while you were doing them? Where did you write your notes? If not, did you regret it when you were doing your projects?.

I’m starting to think that I should be taking notes but at the sime time I feel that I can find pretty much any answer in google so I don’t know, what’s your advice.

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This comes down to personal learning style. I get a lot of value out of hand-writing detailed notes, but I also usually throw them away because writing things down in my own words was the helpful part.

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I guess that’s personal choice, but writing something down doesn’t harm. For me I write some key facts and some codes while taking any class, and it helps most of times while solving immediate exercise or next.
Moreover, it also serves as a reference, things I learned today.
ps . dont force yourself to write if you are not feeling it , but u could give a fare try.

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Hi @handrew335,

I’m starting to think that I should be taking notes but at the sime time I feel that I can find pretty much any answer in google so I don’t know, what’s your advice.

I take a lot of notes, but the notes I take are not “school notes”:

  • My notes are code snippets[0]:
  • My notes are literate files[1]:
  • My notes are faqs, blog posts, bash scripts, configuration files, helper functions,videos, etc.

As you can see my notes are different from “school notes” in the sense that they are something that cannot be memorized/studied. On the contrary they are something that you can use[2].

… I can find pretty much any answer in google …

That is true, but (for example) if you write a code snippet you don’t need to waste time searching in google (that way you can avoid context switching[3])

Cheers and happy coding :slight_smile:

Notes:
[0] Writing snippets

YASnippet is a template system for Emacs. It allows you to type an abbreviation and automatically expand it into function templates.

[1] Literate programming - Wikipedia

The idea is to create workflow that can be easy to follow and use.

[2] Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Wikipedia

This idea comes from the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The part of John Harris library

John’s library included almost every disk he owned, disks loaded with software utilities (self-modified assemblers, routines for modifying files, music generators, animation routines, shape tables)… a lifetime of tools

[3] The Invisible Problem Wrecking Your Productivity And How To Stop It

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In my opinion, there are only a few situations where note taking serves you best:

  1. You have work on an implementation that you’re team doesn’t have knowledge on.
  2. Requirement gathering on a side project and you need to flesh out the technical design

Other than that, I don’t find note taking all that useful.

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