Comment by Bizarro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bizarro | Hacker News Reader

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I'm in the same boat as you. I work from home and so does my wife. I'll just be passing by to go to the bathroom or something and she'll want to have a 20 minute conversation about something. I don't want to be rude, but I'm thinking "I gotta get back at it.."

My memory has never been great, which isn't ideal for being a programmer. Lately, I've had a text editor opened up separate from my code editor where I kind of document my train of thought - especially on fuzzy, complex stuff.

For example, we run everything out of Azure, but I've noticed that for our various environments, but same applications, things are setup in an ad-hoc manner and a little bit different, but still work.

So basically I'm just documenting my train of thought as I setup a new application environment - nothing formal.

That might seem obvious to other development shops, but we're just a couple guys flying by the seat of our pants and things get messy quickly, and memories fade.

Trello is a great tool for this. There are plenty of similar tools as well, including open source alternatives. Your separate open file for mental stack dumping is a great option as well, and something I often use. My favorite, though, is a stack of black index cards on my desk. I like the immediacy, the ease of sorting, and the ability to quickly spread things out or stack them up. Best of all, there's satisfaction in tearing up that card and throwing it away when done. I use Trello quite a bit, but nothing beats the index cards for me. It's something I use both at work and at home.

> Lately, I've had a text editor opened up separate from my code editor where I kind of document my train of thought - especially on fuzzy, complex stuff.

I do something similar. I have a dedicated to-do app, but I like having a more freeform text log as well. On a Mac, https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes works well.

Thanks for the link. This app will solve some needs I have.

Yeah, keeping a text editor with a task-specific file open while I work has been something of a revalation for me. I get distracted or thrown off easily, so it really helps reduce the amount of time it takes to get back to the mental spot that I was at. That, and if I need to leave right after I figure something important out, I’ll put a train of thought note wherever I am in the code without comment delimeters so that I can’t compile until I read it when I return.

> So basically I'm just documenting my train of thought as I setup a new application environment - nothing formal.

You can take it one step further and automate that with something like Terraform. Or more primitively bash scripts but that leads to snowflake environments over time as you said.

Yes I regularly keep notes in plain text editor while I am working, to tell myself what I'm going to do next, or to talk out a difficult problem

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