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Comment by scoutt | Hacker News Reader

My memory problem is not with documentation. Usually my IDE takes care of it.

As soon as I hit 40, I can't remeber what I did last week or before that. Did I solve that problem? Which customer complained about it? Where did I put that PDF?

Fortunately I am very organized, and I leave clues for myself all over the place. Readme files in named folders, details in commits, email myself with some information.

But more than often I am asked "was X display compatible with XYZ board?" and I can't give a direct answer anymore.

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I can relate to that. Things get worse with age: I once googled for a piece of code (I2C driver) for an embedded platform, only to find out that I already wrote one myself, and managed to completely forget about it. Turns out it's a good habit to publish what you wrote.

Oh, yes. I know the feeling of finding forgotten code. When looking at the code I say to myself "this is actually good" (I always think my old code sucks), followed by the question "how did I managed to find time to write all this?".

Several times I've been searching for something that led me to a stackoverflow question or github issue in which I had apparently written the accepted answer years before.

A few years ago I was discussing some bit of Apache configuration, the other dev pulls up the Apache docs to prove I'm wrong. It turns out that I was wrong - because when I wrote those docs on the Apache wiki my phrasing was ambiguous. It was funny showing him the commit history of that page but I had to concede that by a certain interpretation of the phrasing he was not incorrect.

I've since learned to be slightly more verbose.

Sounds like you could use a work journal.

Write a short paragraph after each day and a longer one at the end of the week, describing what was done.

Also maybe write down a short paragraph of what you plan on doing the day after each day, and a longer one at the end of the week about what will be focused on next week.

Review each day and you'll keep a good mental map of what has been done.

I’ve started taking screen recorded video journals of my work. As I explain what I’ve done and what still needs to be done, I am navigating the codebase and highlighting key elements, the way I would during a zoom call with a colleague.

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