Note-taking
Every new technology or topic I approach gets its own directory. I dump everything I learn into it in the form of text files:
- steps taken when learning something new;
- stack traces and conditions to reproduce;
- troubleshooting steps;
- solutions or non-solutions (discovering a way to NOT solve a problem is progress too!)
- quick and dirty blog post drafts
The reason for text files is two-fold: they’re easily version-controlled, and they’re easily searchable via grep.
Originally, I had been keeping these files in Dropbox so I could have access to them on my phone and all of my workstations. But I found that I never accessed them from my phone, as they were primarily for reference while developing or writing. They were disorganized: I had notes for potential blog posts, general notes, development notes and code snippets (and even full blow projects), and there was a lot of topic duplication between these three types.
Tips for success:
- Don’t nest directories too deeply, instead just have a different folder for each topic to make manual lookup faster
- keep all folders lower-cased to simplify tab-completion
Configuration files
dotfiles server config files (nginx, apache, etc)
Workspace setting files
VS Code Eclipse Other software