Using an engineering notebook

I wonder if this sort of thing belings to a certain kind of organisation, or type of career. I can certainly see the value of "we have all of <brilliant engineer's> technical notes going back 43 years!" but in my experience, it's rare to meet a "brilliant engineer" who'll stay in one position for even a decade.

Personally, I've been in many 2-15 year employments where I made copious notes - but I did so in whatever wiki my department was using. I've never had the opportinity (or, for that matter, much desire) to bring those notes with me to the next position, as they were (a) specific to that place or task, and (b) quite certainly proprietary (if far from high-value industrial secrets). Detailed notes on the inner workings of an in-house framework, or end-to-end credit card processing flow, just aren't that relevant when your next role is steward of a 25-year-old national tax reporting platform.

I've done a few blog posts, but haven't generally felt the need to share my brilliant thoughts with the greater world, those were just my personal musings (as is this piece right here).

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to _be_ in a position where such long-term usefulness was expected.

I was given this advice at university, but what I was always missing was what I was supposed to write down in them.

The post here mentions hypotheses, but I don't do experiments for the most part. It mentions writing down in the notebook before writing code, but I can't test my notes, I can't really send my notes for code review. I guess you could use it for design, but you'd lose all the advantages of word processing such as editing, links, context, etc.

I often have a scratch pad editor around with current working state in – that makes sense to me, but not on paper and that's not what's being proposed. I have also at times kept a logbook of what I've done, but it was very much an end of the day/week summary, not in the moment, not forward looking like this mentions.

The idea sounds great, but what is actually being written down?

This is a timely article for me. I was consulting Joe Decuir's Engineering Notebooks just yesterday and wondered if these sorts of notebooks were a common thing or whether it was just Atari.

Joe Decuir was an engineer at Atari and was involved with the development of the 2600. His notebooks can be useful references for the 2600, even to this day.

https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1977

https://archive.org/details/JoeDecuirEngineeringNotebook1978

One thing that has helped me keep to start keeping long-running notebooks (which I use as engineering notebooks at times, among other things) is to actually keep two: one for immediate notes that I treat as disposable, and then another for "permanent" stuff. The former is a little 3x5 pocket notebook that literally lives in my pocket (or beside my keyboard), and I can jot stuff down in whatever order or format is convenient at the time. When I have a bit of time, I go through and "reconcile" the smaller notebook with the larger one (a regular composition book) by copying over the relevant information and indexing it. I then cross off the pages in the pocket notebook so I'll know I've dealt with them. (FWIW this is inspired by the bookkeeping practice of keeping a "wastebook" or "journal" that is just a list of transactions as they happen, and later "posting" or reconciling them into one's ledgers.)

This has a couple benefits. First, you always get better work if you go through more than one draft. Second, the idea of something being in the "permanent" notebook forever can cause me to freeze up a bit, not wanting to "mess it up". Having a place where I can "stage" or draft my entries helps with this.

In case you want to take a look at it, the author has posted a photo of a page of her notebook on her mastodon. https://tietz.social/@nicole/116048644600363842

I've been doing this more and more over the past year, but I just write on plain white paper and throw it away after the stack on my desk gets too big.

Like the author, I don't seem to ever need to read my old notes. Instead, it works wonders as a mental bucket of sorts and I've found paper to be extremely powerful for this. I tried doing this on a Surface Pro, for example, but it was significantly less enjoyable or effective.

Now with LLMs helping me write code, planning ahead on paper is even more useful.

I think this is great advice. One thing that I think is simultaneously trite and under-appreciated is the degree to which writing itself drives strong memory formation, even if the notes themselves aren’t particularly good or detailed. I’ve been keeping technical notebooks for about a decade now, and I’ve found that I can open up to almost any page and remember exactly what I was thinking when I scrawled on it. By contrast, things I write in Obsidian need much more context (i.e. detail) to remind me what I was thinking.

This is maybe a bit of a tangent to this article,but I've tried so many pieces of tech over the years to replace pen & paper notebooks, mainly iPads and eInk based notetaking devices, like the Remarkable.

While I cannot find a concrete flaw with these things, with some of them working quite well, I just couldn't really get a feel for them - they always felt so tech-y and imprecise, that I always went back to an actual sheet of paper.

Another product design misconception I think a lot of companies make is the use of metal cases - metal feels high-end and durable as opposed to plastic I suppose, and with it being quite solid, manufacturers can make it thinner and lighter.

But it's uncomfortable to hold, and hard to manufacture complex shapes, which means these devices often end up in a case. Man I miss the 2000s when product design wasn't dead.

For my side projects I have a dev log and every day that I work on them I've gotten into the habit of writing "What I want to accomplish", "What I did", and "What's next", which all seems to capture my thoughts pretty well. I don't get super detailed on them, but I can look back at previous days to see what I should work on next and it helps me goal set better. Also helps me when I need to pause on my work for the day so I can pick it up later.

I use Obsidian to record decisions, plan every day and take detailed notes. Very handy for recalling the nitty gritty for future reference be it performance reviews, writing blogs or updating my resume.

Just wanted to flag the use of the little "jump back to where I was reading" links on the footnotes is a feature I'll be implementing and using on every footnote I ever write for the rest of my life now. Thank you!

How long before people realize that they too have limited context length and adopt:

- memory/yyyy-mm-dd.md

- MEMORY.md

- SOUL.md

Is an engineering notebook a specific kind of notebook? Google has a lot of results for "engineering notebook" but they seem to be all expensive fancy notebooks that have thin gridded paper

I'd have a hard time with a physical notebook. Speed and search are key.

My workspace is just a markdown file, with dates and work-in-progress (scripts, bug investigations, design notes, task lists...), by date (reversed), rolled up to month files. If something (non-code) bears remembering, it's normalized and published to others, or put into my own topic space (leaving the WIP notes).

The key feature is global search over all such files. I can find any activity and any topic in seconds, with a search-bar overview of all places where I addressed some subject. (As a result I tend to create unique names.)

As a discipline, speaking directly and constantly to future self does help establish more methodical approaches, reinforces context awareness (and avoid ratholes); I restart even small projects where I left off, and scale the number of projects I try. Somehow the act of writing provides a reflective time/instant boundary (think: clocks in a functional universe) that orients the work in time/relevance to avoid wasting time on things that matter less.

I’ve been doing this for the past 15 years - writing “LAZYs”, started off as just .txt files, now .md. The nice thing with it now you can search through it easily or give it to Codex

I do the same thing, but with a Markdown file which I add a section to every day in a roughly append-only fashion

I have settled on a way to do append only notes by having a "journal" user on my xmpp server, and I take notes by sending them asciidoc formatted messages. I have been too lazy to do it so far, but I could extract the messages from the server and compile them into something more easily browsed.

In my research I take notes exactly as described here. I use plain-text files, one per week, with dated sections using markdown-ish notation where convenient. Display is never a goal; approximately 80-char column plaintext is the target format.

I agree with other commenters here that typing gives me more flexibility, in particular when writing arguments. I’ll format each point as a bullet and rearrange the list until I’m satisfied with the flow.

The notebook is essential for recovering tidbits learned along the way, e.g. what tricky steps did I need to get that one dependency to build. Weekly notepads are coarse enough to search by memory and contain enough context to get oriented quickly when going back several months.

We have a strong culture of engineering notebooks in my org. I tried for a good 5 years — i carried one and probably filled up 5 of them.

But i went back to them maybe 5 times in all those years. And the effort of writing actually distracts me more than the effortless action of typing. Plus the search and backup functions.

Even in high school in the early 90s I typed up all my class notes because the act of transcribing my written scratch to typed notes cemented it in my memory — i remember the sensation of recalling something for a test by air typing.

I guess with this history, its just how Ive trained myself so I carry laptop every where I go and type on that, but I al jealous of some of the well crafted and illustrated notes of some peers — especially the ones with multicolor pens for differentiation.

I use a physical notebook but not really an engeneering notebook as described here.

I make notes while working and notes during meetings. Honestly most of it never gets read after a eay but I still do it.

Very few of my colleagues carry a notebook around. Those who do are not seen taking notes too often.

Surprised it’s not mentioned, but important for the sake of patents too

Interesting. I use a paper notebook to but it's the opposite of detailed. I use one when I have several ideas in my head and I need to get them out before I forget some, or when I need to figure something out that's a wee bit too complicated to keep all the bits and bobbles in my brain-RAM.

But I write down just enough to offload the memory to paper. They're literal notes. Just enough so that I can remember what I was on about earlier. But probably not detailed enough I could come back in a couple months and recollect the rest of the details. What's the point in that anyway? These are things I intend to act on. Once I commit them to code, then the code becomes the source of truth.

I've been using the "Zim desktop wiki" like this for years. I do recommend it as well...super handy to be able to go looking for my thoughts or snippets from 6 months ago. I can also use git to sync between my desktop and laptop because it's all text.

100% i've been using paper notebooks since I started coding

I do this but instead in a google doc. Even better because I can use LLM's to query it aftewards.

For me, this helps in getting clarity. I do it especially during meetings it helps me think criticallyb- talk just flows by otherwise.

I found a similar blog post like this years ago at the start of my career and started keeping a Rhodia Webnotebook A5. I've got over a dozen now from all my years of work. Nice for nostalgia

Human journalctl. Probably a good habit to try. Especially with an LLM to search and aggregate it later.

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