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How do you document what you are learning at work?

by seeyes on 2/4/16, 7:40 PM with 12 comments

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?

  • by drl42 on 2/5/16, 4:47 PM

    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

  • by e19293001 on 2/6/16, 4:11 AM

    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/

  • by theGREENsuit on 2/5/16, 2:11 PM

    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.

  • by kat on 2/4/16, 9:19 PM

    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)

  • by atmosx on 2/5/16, 3:23 PM

    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

  • by davelnewton on 2/4/16, 8:11 PM

    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.

  • by ApolloRising on 2/5/16, 3:40 AM

    I found Evernote was the easiest way to always have it around.

  • by afarrell on 2/5/16, 5:11 AM

    A directory of markdown files. I use git for version control.

  • by tugberkk on 2/5/16, 9:54 AM

    I just write them to text files and usually lose them.

  • by SkyRocknRoll on 2/6/16, 4:57 PM

    I use gist.github.com