[cdoxsey]

For work I used to use Evernote, but these days I just have a folder of markdown files named by date. (20200208.md)

Anytime I run a new command, SQL query or work on a new issue I try to write it down in the note before running it. Then I commit+push everything at the end of the day.

At least for me, knowledge degrades quickly. So having a history of that command I ran to fix X three weeks ago is a life saver.

I've found that better organization isn't really needed because find is good enough and I usually have a vague sense of where I'll find what I'm looking for anyway.

Also these day private GitHub repos are free. So it doesn't cost anything to setup.

For teams you can use runbooks as the same concept. Anytime you on work on an on-call issue record the steps you took to fix it. At Datadog we just used GitHub issues in a dedicated runbook repo, but almost anything could work. The point is to reduce friction as much as possible and eliminate decision points. You can always clean it up later but if the barrier for entry is too high developers won't bother doing it.

Remember this is a developer at their worst - it's 3am, they're fixing something they might know little to nothing about, and they're working as fast as possible under pressure. Any additional procedure needs to be as lightweight as possible.

But if you get it right, man does it make on-call and onboarding easier.