Keeping Personal Cheat Sheets as a Software Engineer | Hacker News Reader

Keeping Personal Cheat Sheets as a Software Engineer

joshuaestes.me

43 pointsf1gm3nt16 comments

If you like this idea, you might want to check out Cheatography - it's a tool for creating stylish cheat sheets. I used it a little when it was first announced, but haven't kept up with it. It's a great idea, and the developer was really friendly when I was checking it out.

http://www.cheatography.com/

Cheatography is awesome, and the developer who built it is really cool and talented and handsome and me. :)

Thanks for mentioning Cheatography. It's a bit of a labour of love, and I wish I had more time to put into it.

Hey Dave. Thank you :)

I've tried this several times, but I always find that by the time I've been stumped by something enough times to write it down, I'm on the verge of having it learned anyway. So, my cheat sheets just become random bits of paper full of stuff I already know, and I start new ones. Rinse and repeat. It's a nifty trick but I don't think there's any substitute for good ol' repetition and understanding.

Ha! When you're old enough you'll forget what you've forgotten you've forgotten.

Right, but while you might know how to do it, the person next to you may not. I write stuff down because it might be an issue that I encounter once every 6 months and I hate to have to relearn it, but also someone might run into the same issue, and I can expend less brain power/time to help someone else learn it.

http://www.mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/

Hold 'command' key to see all shortcuts for current application.

I have a git repo with work notes in.

It all goes in there:

    root@osboxes:/space/git/work/notes# ls | head
    7z
    abs-guide
    algorithms
    anacron
    angularjs
    ansible
    ant
    apache2
    apt_and_dpkg

300 folders and counting...

How do you manage this repository? Have auto-commits, auto-pushing, auto-anything?

I have automation around the downloading of pdfs that interest me and the production of man pages to pdfs. Gradually I'm developing conventions around format and so on, but it's pretty idiosyncratic, as you can imagine.

I use "cheat" to help with less-used options for *NIX commands, probably similar to what you're doing. You create a separate "cheat sheet" for each command (7z, ant, etc.) and then "cheat 7z" dumps it to the console so you can cut-and-paste what you need.

https://github.com/chrisallenlane/cheat

So far I've relied on grep, but I like that idea and will likely implement it.

Not quite the same, but similar: Print-to-PDF. I've been doing this instead of bookmarks for years now, and as a result have a huge library of local PDF's, usable offline, for all kinds of technologies that I'm interested in/use regularly. With a few key searches I can find all the docs on luarocks, or mysql FAQ's, etc. - I find this a great way to have searchable local documentation for the moments I need to look things up. Its not quite a cheat sheet, but having my own local searchable PDF archive for all the technical howto/tutorial-style HN articles of interest over the years has been invaluable.

I keep appending to a file in my home directory. I've aliased it too so that I can access it quickly. Every ~month I email it to myself or back it up elsewhere.

$ alias ed

alias ed='$EDITOR ~/.diary"

The file looks something like this:

# 4/3/2015

Command Comments

-------------------------------------------

M-l # Emacs, lowercase next word

Hm. How about a cheat-web-link? This stuff's gotta already be online, neatly summarized.

My vim cheatsheet lives in my dotfiles repo. Always gets cloned into a fresh system.

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