My number one recommendation is to not get overly excited about it. One of the first things that happen when you start using Anki and realize the superpower that it is being in charge of your memory is that you want to include EVERYTHING in it.

You start creating cards with obscure bash one-liners, little-used git commands, or Javascript functions you read about in a random article. You add all of it to Anki. After all, you might use them in the future right? And it doesn't cost you anything to create a card with them so why not.

What happens is that because you don't have a clear picture of why those cards are valuable to you - you just added them because they might be useful, one of these days - you will have trouble retaining their knowledge, meaning that you will keep failing to successfully review those cards.

And because of the way spaced repetition algorithms work, those cards will be constantly appearing in your reviews, and you will keep failing them. And they will keep appearing. And so on and so forth until you lose all motivation to use Anki because it's becoming a frustrating experience to do your reviews.

The most important thing about using Anki is to keep using it. That's how you get the benefits of it, so be more selective about what you add to Anki instead of profligately adding cards that you gain nothing from.

Coworkers, neighbors (like that neighbor 3 blocks away that I talked with for a few minutes about {such-and-such}, but don't see that often), restaurant employees/proprietors, delivery people, maintenance workers, friends-of-friends I've met.

Without Anki I have an abysmal memory for names. I have aphantasia[0] which might relate to my difficulty with names.

Now, with Anki, (if I'm using it regularly) I have a freakishly good memory for names. :)

Goes a long way to helping others feel welcome and appreciated, which in turn means _I_ end up feeling welcome and appreciated. A very virtuous cycle.

Edit: I'm a software engineer, but most of my Anki usage is not focused on software engineering directly. To create new Anki cards, I follow the "20 rules for formulating knowledge"[1], so it takes a bit of work before I can take some new bit of information and "process" it to something ready for Anki.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

[1]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

- what does ABC stand for

- describe process X

- how process X differs from Y, and why

- what is the role of system A in process Z

- what is the shape of data that comes from A to B in process Ł

This vastly reduced the number of times I got stumped with something during various high-level meetings (to the point that I routinely pointed out some false assumptions people made). It worked better for me than passive documentation. The domain was unusually complex though.

- Emacs Commands

- Emacs Key Strokes

- Greek letters, words and sounds

- The wikipedia List of non-standard dates

- Physic ideas

- General principles of organization

- Learning principles

- Bible verses

- Command line utility options

- Vimium key strokes

Basically anything that I want to learn I end up ankifying. I find that Anki is most effective for remembering things that I don't do all the time, but need to remember two or three times a week/month. Here's a good tip, if you need to DuckDuckGo it more than once it's probably a good idea to throw it in an Anki card.

That way, you can build a knowledge base of what actually interests you, which you’re much more likely to study and retain in the first place.

* HTTP status codes

* Acronyms

* Syntax mistakes (spot the bug).

* Command line or vim snippets, e.g. "write a for loop over all files in a directory in bash" "grep and only show match"

I find it most useful for catching things I commonly screw up. The trick, of course, is to build the habit of identifying when you've repeated a blunder and then to make it into a card. An example for this in Go would be using `range` and forgetting the second arg: `for val := range slice` is legal syntax, but `val` is actually the index var here, it should be `for _, val := range slice`.

It's usually simple things, like what's the method signature for slice? Or how do I run bash inside of a docker container?

The tough part for me is sticking to reviewing. There, I'm trying to figure out where to attach it to something I often already do.