alt Hacker NewsI'm a scientist. In the science world, the traditional lab notebook contained a narrative of what you were doing. You're kind of thinking out loud into it.
One measure of a good notebook is if it contains sufficient information that you don't have to repeat work only because you can't figure out what you did. There are other good reasons for repeating things of course.
My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her meticulous notebooks. She was telling me just last week that one of her experiments produced a puzzling result. The next day she said: "I figured it out from my notebook. I skipped a step that was in the procedure."
There was a time when a notebook was also a legal document, and so there was a criterion of whether it would stand up in court as proof that you had invented something. Could a "person skilled in the art" replicate your work based on your notebook? My dad told me that his notebooks were regularly reviewed and witnessed.
The legal issues have changed, since the patent system has switched to the "first to file" rule. My employer got rid of its formal notebook policy when this change came through.
My problem with physical notebooks is that a great deal of my work is computational, and I automate things. In my case, the best form for recording my work is in fact a Jupyter notebook. On the other hand, I come from a family of chemists, and taking electronic notes in a "wet" chemistry lab is often impractical.
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> There was a time when a notebook was also a legal document
This is still the case in certain fields like policing where, in the United Kingdom at least, an officer's pocket notebook is an important document, albeit with some police forces now moving to electronic solutions for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_notebook
Engineering notebooks were required at my first job in the 1970s, for patent reasons. The notebook pages are numbered and it has a real sewn binding, making it harder to remove or insert a page without being noticed. We were required to date and sign each page and start a new page every day.
By the time I retired I think I was the only one at my company using one. I had to special order to get a proper one with the quad ruling, numbered pages, and sewn binding.
(Note that this is why Jupyter and Wolfram use the word "notebook" for their interface format)
I also keep a 'lab notebook', but I must admit that a lot of what I used to document in my notes (setting up software/compiling 3rd party deps) I now document in code (scripts, devops, etc).
I still find lots of value in keeping notes though! And sometimes miss it when I didn't keep notes.
Anecdotally I've heard from my biochem circle of friends, that many institutions (at least in Germany) are still quite particular when it comes to lab notebooks. Especially ones that strongly monetize on patents, e.g. Frauenhofer. They usually also provide electronic lab notebooks which can either be used directly or into which you have to store copies of the original physical lab notebook.
I suspect that this may be due to different copyright mechanisms in different jurisdictions. e.g. in Germany employees have stronger protections that may allow them to still patent stuff developed in their free time, so companies might want to have a stronger papertrail to prove that outcomes tie back to something done during working hours.