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Comment by jmt_ | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have experience using something like Obsidian as a sort of lab manual for software engineering? How do you structure your notes? What gets written down? I use Obsidian and the note of the day plugin which uses a template that has a todo list and a Recap section in which I intended to summarize the work I did that day and any comments worth writing down. I used the todo list part daily but I've struggled to consistently write the recap. I think it's too vague; I'm looking for a little more structure that makes recaping the day easier and manageable. When I try to write a recap currently, it can feel overwhelming as I try to think what I should and shouldn't write, and how I should or shouldn't write it.

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I've been using TiddlyWiki for this for a few years. It started off as being my lab notebook and has expanded to be my everything-under-the-sun notebook.

It began simply. It started because I had a bunch of new services/apps being thrown at me on a new project on a bunch of new servers. I recorded the information and linked it all together and expanded it to include meeting notes (on the level of minutes), transcriptions from my physical notebook, research notes ("here are examples of the issue, what we expect, what we think it should be, all the stuff I've tried, etc."), architecture notes.

TiddlyWiki has a journaling feature that I use for the recap-level you talk about. I usually head the journal entry "Minutes of the Day." There will be a bullet point for each project/stream and then sub-bullets for each meeting (with top level decisions/takeaways under that) or thing I did. It's a bit subjective, but I keep these entries high level and will hyperlink to more detailed research notes.

I do, but not in any deliberately very structured way. I use daily notes as a high-level "this is what i worked on" journal, with links to the details of those items. For example:

  # Work
  
  Added feature [Foo](https://pivotal/...) to [[Bar Project]]
  - Learned about sprockets: <https://wikipedia/Sprocket>
  
  Talked to Jane about the state of [[Qux Project]]

As I'm writing it, it gives me quick access to the resources I'm using today. With backlinks, if I'm looking at the "Bar Project" page, I can see when I was working on it and what resources I was using on those days.

My process optimizes for low friction. I want to take notes, not necessarily spend a lot of time rigorously organizing notes. It also gives me a sort of the timeline view that Zettelkasten fans like, but without the rigorous tree structure that I don't personally seem to benefit from.

I've had relative success with keeping it open + on all desktops. I don't fullscreen anything, so it's always visible - since I started doing that, I'm MUCH more consistent about updating it.

Prior to that, I had this small script that'd open textedit to a daily-note every time I made a terminal session, which served much the same purpose: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22279802 . Obsidian makes it a lot easier to jump between days though :)

(as a semi-aside: I very much like Obsidian. It's one of the only "just let me use my pile of normal markdown/commonmark files like I want" apps I've found, after trying dozens. it's very very very unintrusive / doesn't impose any structure. highly recommended!)

Slightly tangential, but does anyone have a story for how to share Obsidian notebooks in a team context? That's the one major thing I've found missing in these off-line first notebook apps.

Obsidian uses markdown files stored in a folder, so any fileshare should work fine. There's no account management or permissions needed, either you have the .md files or you don't. I use Dropbox to carry notes between my PC and laptop, but I've seen a lot of talk of hosting on GitHub or similar services as well, which would give you revision history and authoring if you needed to know who did what

I do a tiny bit, but even less structured than you're describing (and less consistently), so I'm curious to see other responses here.

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