I realized that over the years, I learned a lot of things. After coming across some facts or helpful techniques, I had many aha moments where I thought, wow, this is awesome. But fast forward four years, I have vague impressions of things but don’t recall them exactly. Wrt programming, I would be able to do similar things faster with experiences from previous encounters. But I was missing some nitty-gritty things I already faced.

I came to the opinion that I must document or log most pieces of information so that it would take me lesser time to understand when I come across them again.

I started to have sheets of paper to take notes when I read things. I also started bookmarking exciting blogs, articles, and videos. But browser bookmarks became cumbersome to manage with arbitrary levels of nesting and tough to search. Then I came across the beautiful Pocket app (now maintained by Mozilla, more reason to use?). You can save articles for future reference or bookkeeping or offline reading. I also used it for marking articles to be read when I have free time and read them offline during the commute. My most favorite feature is adding tags to items and searching with tags. Tags provide me more power by avoiding hierarchies like browser bookmarks and powerful search. I like the neat browser extension to save things with minimal hassle and multiple device sync.

Sometimes I felt that I was logging too much and losing focus on the main task at hand and becoming less productive. I am still trying to find the right balance for myself. I am also worried that writing out stuff makes me feel I remember fewer things now with the added cushion that I can come back?

This obsession with logging things has become too big for me. I wanted to log everything: my thoughts, notes, articles, blogs, web activity, series watched, etc. I wanted to write out things explicitly instead of implicit inspired by Infrastructure As Code (Terraform I heard you) and, more generally, Everything as Code. I thought this would be great for future reference and reflect upon.

I started writing sticky notes for things to do, checklists (I wish to reduce the clearing time of the items stuck forever on the fridge). To electronically organize my notes, I started using Google Keep (with the worry that Google would kill it soon) for note-taking with little focus to avoid distracting. And as a Cron Job, I filter them weekly/bi-weekly and then archive them. Keep became too cluttery now with many fat notes. Also, my browser keeps hanging because of loading all notes at once, I guess. I also faced some problems during 3-way merges between multiple devices. (In search of other apps, I have heard good reviews about Notion, didn’t use it yet)

I feel every developer should have a dev diary for maintaining short logs. And maybe a personal journal is as (or more) needed?