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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to do almost the opposite: as I gain experience, the number of tools that I want to be able to use keeps getting bigger, which makes it unreasonable for me to try to remember the details of how to use any of them.

I make a lot of my own notes ( https://til.simonwillison.net/ ) but I also rely very heavily on Google, and I'm fine with that.

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I think a good way of looking at it is like the knowledge circles where everything inside the circle is stuff you don’t google but everything outside is things you do. Over time the circle expands as you learn more but this leads to more things you need to google.

If I find myself googling the same thing over and over, it goes into notes.

The issue with notes is when the solution changes because of an update. Using Google and grabbing recent solutions gets you updated answers if and when things change.

I try to find the balance between both of these options. I think it’s important to remember that just because someone wrote a blog post recently doesn’t mean it’s better. It also depends what you consider “core” knowledge, as an example I don’t need to google how to rebase anymore but I sure as heck do google something new about git every week.

Sigh... searching is redundant, not guaranteed to be sorted the same, not guaranteed to be up-to-date, and updates are not guaranteed to be correct. your notes will last forever, whether or not the software changes under your feet.

I (try to) take notes, and look around once i see a deprecation warning.

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