[wainstead]

> I'm also curios to know if it depends on the career, maybe a ML Engineer need more note taking than an electrician who wire cables

I started keeping a “log” back in 1999 just for work (I too am a software engineer). I note what I worked on and/or what problems I was trying to solve and/or what solutions I found. And some personal stuff too.

My inspiration is the idea of the scientist’s lab book where “if you didn’t write it down it didn’t happen.”

Countless times — even this past week - it has proven invaluable when I wanted to look up how I solved something before (“how do we generate those CSP headers on the fly?” “How did I mount that Docker container?”) or when no one knows why something was built a certain way (and I noted the date and time a manager made that decision).

After a few years I wind up with a few novels worth of entries (by volume) so it’s amazing how writing a little each day adds up.

As to format, it started as a .txt file in Emacs but has evolved into a moderately simple org-mode file.

[FinnKuhn]

If I understand this correctly you could almost describe your note taking as writing a personal documentation

[wainstead]

I guess you could describe it that way, but it reads more like a journal.