I don't understand the pen/physical notebook thing. It's slow to write, insanely slow to search what you've written, almost impossible to copy or share.
In comparison it’s much faster to draw, infinitely more portable and much less distracting. I use pen and paper for self notes that are throwaway in nature or exploring ideas. For artefacts that are meant to be shared with others I use a computer
I believe that is the beauty. It makes you be intentional, your mind slows down at a pace that does a double write to your brain (helping you remember better). If remembering with your brain is the RAM, then writing it down is the ROM.
In the context of this post it's not about preserving or sharing the thoughts. Writing, in this case, is a "thinking tool". Forcing yourself to materialise the thoughts as actual, written, text helps form clear ideas.
that’s so alien to me. for me, writing by hand is frustrating to the point of distraction. if I want to think clearly, my best bet is to do it silently, in my head.
To me, if the problem is too complex, or more likely, if I expect to be distracted by family and chores, "building in my head" is not the best option as it all falls apart and need to build it up from scratch (though admittedly faster than last time).
people's brains all work differently and for some of them manually writing help them think better, and apparently your are not in this case. I don't think there is much else to understand.
Writing by hand definitely is better for a squirrel brain like me. And searching is overrated, most note-taking is write-only and tends to accumulate without anyone ever reading it back. So optimize for memory retention so you can later form better mental associations with the material, rather than how searchable on a computer it is. Notes on a PC are inert, what you want is to integrate their contents into your brain so you can actually do something with it.
I also use a notebook and pen constantly as a software engineer - but never when I need any of the properties you just mentioned.
It is absolutely the wrong tool for any long-term information store. Ephemeral think-it-through process notes only. Obsidian for anything that should live longer than the current problem I’m trying to solve.
I used to have a hybrid setup of paper as an offloading tool + Notion as a knowledge management system. However, since moving to Obsidian, I've never felt the need to use paper. Adding a line item in my daily note is much faster and efficient for me
I use a notebook. It forces me to slow down. I don´t like to cross/erase blocks of text so I actually think about what I'm about to write before writing it. It helps the same way rubber duck debugging does.
Funny. I was tolling the virtues of my spiral notebook which is always on my desk to a coworker, whom I was trying to get out of some trouble and i got... silence. That notebook is the difference between said coworker and I. She didn't get it.
That notebook is the fastest most accessible tool to capture my thoughts. I can state concisely what was discussed in a team meeting last october before any notetaking tool boots up. I know kids names, birthdays and favorite movies of almost all my coworkers which I can glance without switching windows while sharing my screen.
the impossibility of such content being legible to anyone else and being shared is a feature I value very highly.
i take it where i want, introspect, take notes. No screen. No distractions. I doodle, draw lines, write jokes, whatever.
Pages on the right are work things. On the left are my ideas. Index on the first page tells me exactly where to turn to for that idea and mockups i had on filling tedious forms.
I know when I'm spinning my wheels. I can see the gaps in my thinking from months ago. I can see patterns in human behavior that I would otherwise have not noticed.
The simplicity is a huge advantage. I stopped looking for anything better. I don't try to promote it
either (except on rare occasions). Saved me hours.
I think an analog note taking device (woah!) requires more discipline than a digital one. In the digital world, you can always re-arrange your chaos at almost no cost, whereas you are screwed in the analog world. I'm curious: How do you organize your notes? If you mind to share.
First there's a work notebook and a personal one. both are semi structured, but work one has more structure.
first page is always for index, split vertically and you get roughly 80 entries with about 3-4 words each. one for each page that i number as i go writing through the book. index usually has just pointers to days when i get interesting ideas.
each right page is for 1 week that i label up top. a small margin is dedicated for recurring meetings. using only the right side allows quickly flipping through. rest of the page is for todos and logs.
left pages are for related thoughts, ideas, etc from that week. sometimes overflows but not by much.
For wordy stuff, i use pages from the back of the book. I don't use sentences much. Just few words with lines connecting them.
Thats pretty much it - index, numbered pages and using just the right side per week. It works wonders for how simple it is. You'll find something else that works for you. Don't overthink this. Just start with a structure and let it evolve.
side note - i do use a folder for plain text notes on my work laptop (that i keep open in sublime) for links and text that benefits from copy and paste. i would not care if it all got deleted or leaked out to the world. I also have another folder of interesting bookmarks and articles exported to pdf for reading on a flight on my phone. i have a dozen or so google docs with my thoughts on topics i'm interested in.
> You'll find something else that works for you. Don't overthink this. Just start with a structure and let it evolve.
I'm currently looking at a stack of lovely "Leuchtturm1917" A5 note books. The way I took notes for the last three years has been chaotic, that's why I was interested in your way of doing them. I think, finding a mode of work and let it grow and iterate over time is the way to go. I see room for improvement with regards to how I structure my notes, so that I can find them again - that's what I'm struggeling with in my analog world. So, thanks for your insights, they are really valuable!
What do you do when you make a mistake? Do you use an eraser instead of backspace? That is my major problem with notebooks.
I type much faster on a keyboard, I can read it even a month from now while I can't do that with my own handwriting, and when I make a mistake, I can quickly and easily correct it.
I do almost no organising of my paper notes. The only thing I do is that I add a date to the corner of the first page of when I start making a specific note and I keep index pages where I list page/note titles (or topics, themes, not everything have a title) and a page number.
I often browse my notes even when I'm not looking for anything. I read what I've been thinking previously because that often sparks new ideas and thoughts.
One thing where I find pen and paper superior to digital is that it's easy to write in the margins, draw arrows and annotate. When I got my first iPad and tested out digital notebook tools (with stylus), I was excited about the idea that I can resize and move my existing drawings around.
Then it took me a few days to notice that I don't really ever need that. I don't need my "finished" notes to look tidy or good. I got over the need to have organised and structured notebooks and embraced the chaos.
I guess it's different things for different people. For me, the flexibility of paper is superior to any digital solution because it has the shortest "input lag" or "feedback loop" to my brain. I'm happy to sacrifice other potential benefits for that.
I took the pen+notebook idea a bit further, I use pen+paper (a sheet of paper).
To me, none of the qualities you listed matter when it comes to sketching ideas, thinking about problems, staying on track while problem solving. When I'm done with the task, I read through my notes once and throw it out.
If you want to get the most out of a physics lecture, leave the laptop at home. Instead, bring a spiral notebook and some colored pens. Write everything down the prof writes on the blackboard.
It's remarkable how much of the lecture you'll remember. And when you read your handwritten notes, you'll remember the lecture that went with it.
I would copy what they were writing. The professors had 9 blackboards available, and they'd use them all during a 55 minute lecture, and then some. Some would write with their left hand while erasing with the right (!). It was a heluva time for me. Never before or since have I learned so much so fast. Blink and I fell behind.
In retrospect, I sorely wished I had set up a cassette recorder and recorded all the audio. It would be a gold mine today, as all those lectures are lost to time.
On the other hand, I had no money to buy cassette tapes at the time.
I never learnt much in those sort of lectures. Eventually I figured out I needed to study the material before the lecture and use the lecture to cement what I had already learnt or occasionally answer questions that had come up.
I managed it for 4 years in college, with usually 3 hours of lecture per day. Was it work? Sure. One was busy the whole lecture. But the results were clear.
My favorite pens at the time were the Pilot pens. Today I love the Tul pens.
I have long since scanned them all in. I should post them on my website, just for fun.
They aren’t optimising for speed, sharing, or searchability. Notes of this type aren’t an inadequate database, but a tool for thinking. Note-takers visualize and symbolise their thinking while they work through a problem. Writing and drawing reduce cognitive load and externalise information so it doesn’t have to be held in memory. Notes also create a useful record of that process so you can see how you got to your solution. Notebooks are just a convenient UI for that process.
I use A4 sheets of paper, pens with different colours and fluorescent markers. Nothing beats that for me (and I have a iPad Pro with stylus) and I use emacs with org mode too.
I use an automatic scanner to store the important papers as documentation. Now you can even send those to gemini or google cloud to digitalise it for cheap.
At any given time I have four sheets of paper over my desk that I can see in parallel, but I could have 8 or 10 for complex problems with areas equivalent to engineering or architectural blueprints.
Having said that, I can draw and paint very well as I was interested since childhood and had formal training. Probably is not for everyone, but it is for me.
Division on this topic reminds me of the division between those who prefer light vs heavy development tools. Some enjoy mastering and wielding powerful tools, but others see them as a distraction.
I like it when trying to work things out/design things as I can easily scribble down quick drawings to keep myself right. This is much easier with a pencil and paper than trying to do it on a computer to me.
Only to an extent. I write fast enough with pen and paper that my thinking is the bottleneck — which isn't really that fast. I don't need to write down everything I think so it also acts as a filter and processor of those thoughts.
> insanely slow to search what you've written
Compared to digital notes system, sure. But the way I use my notes, I don't usually need a full-text search to find stuff. I remember what I've been working on, I often browse through my notebooks to revisit ideas and most often these notebook notes are kind of a "working copy" where the search relevance is often just for the feature so it only needs to be fast to search for a few days or weeks.
I also do copy many of my notes down in digital format too when there's something worth capturing for long term storage for the sake of searching for example.
> almost impossible to copy or share
100%. Sharing is not a consideration for me, these are my raw pure thoughts and explorations, they don't often make much sense to other people as-is. Sometimes I may take a photo of a UI sketch or something to share if needed but otherwise when I have something to share, I write it based on my notes rather than sharing my notes as they are.
Searching through a physical notebook does take a few moments, but the upside is all of that context you get to drink in during the search.
I typically get through a couple of B5 pages a day, so homing in on the thing I want to look at is a matter of opening the notebook to roughly the right fortnight and then flicking through up to a dozen pages in either direction. A tenth of a second per page is enough to scan for major events - what projects was I working on at the time? Were there any major interruptions to my flow, or changes in direction?
And then, once I've found the right day, seeing the detail of everything I was doing at the time triggers a flood of memories - I remember all of the conversations, decisions, problems, and ideas that were current at the time of the entry in question.
I've tried a number of digital notetaking systems, but none has been able to give me so much context so quickly as a paper notebook.
that's probably the most important thing. it forces you to slow down and think it through and actually absorb it.
Searching what I have written in the past would be useless for me because it wouldn't necessarily make sense. It's more about the physically writing it out.
Calling a notebook the “most important tool” for a dev is pure romanticism. Useful for some, sure, but let's not pretend it outweighs a debugger, version control, or CI. This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.
I was the same until I started working on a Go server. It helps immensely when I want to know the value of objects say when a request is handled and how that flows.
I do not know what you work on, but debugging is indispensable for certain workloads. Print debugging doesn’t come close to setting up a breakpoint and inspecting every single variable in the stack with a good interface. You don’t even have to select what to print and where, anything can be printed anywhere in two clicks. A UI like the debuggers in Jetbrains IDEs provides smart rendering for all types so that for example map or list elements can be collapsed. The entire call stack is neatly organized and searchable too. It saves hours, creates less friction and also greatly enhances exploratory debugging, where you don’t even know where in the call stack your problem might be. I’d feel very hindered and unhappy if I didn’t have access to a good debugger.
My bread and butter at one point was working on various pathfinding and numerical computing problems, and I'm primarily a print statement debugger. The time evolution of the system is usually the most important signal for debugging these types of problems, and is easy to dump.
That's not to say I don't also use debuggers when necessary, I just reserve those for very hairy problems that can't be solved any other way, e.g. stepping into dependencies. Let's not forget that debuggers have their limitations too, e.g. release build GC optimization (or indeed any release-only bug), and any init process where you have to attach the debugger after the startup, fundamentally cannot be debugged using debuggers.
I don't know you or your work. But I know (senior) developers that don't use a debugger and I've often noticed that when fixing a bug, they don't build a full mental model of what really goes wrong and often just fix the symptoms. Think "that shouldn't be null, we need a null check here" instead of "why is this value null? we should check here, but also make sure the caller works correctly."
On the other hand, though this is n = 1 and from 2000 (and it is classic Linus):
Linus Torvalds:
> I don't like debuggers. Never have, probably never will. I use gdb all the time, but I tend to use it not as a debugger, but as a disassembler on steroids that you can program.
> I don't think kernel development should be "easy". I do not condone single-stepping through code to find the bug. I do not think that extra visibility into the system is necessarily a good thing.
> Oh. And sure, when things crash and you fsck and you didn't even get a clue about what went wrong, you get frustrated. Tough. There are two kinds of reactions to that: you start being careful, or you start whining about a kernel debugger.
> I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger. I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different _level_.
And I agree. At least for me, print debugging goes a long way, and I'm already invested in building mental models about code. I think using a proper debugger has to be the last resort, because nothing else works and it's time to get into the ugly details. Two valuable avenues for producing good code are formal verification (and its ilk, such as specification) and horse sense/common sense, which combine to say that we should have rigorous mental models that impose on our code. That's the primary objective, to me. The use of tools such as debuggers is secondary, and in my experience, largely neutral or harmful. There's the classic caveat of "if your goal is to ship code fast, then this isn't practical", which is fair, but I have some things to say about shucking off that culture.
Debugger for me is more about inspection than actual debugging, especially when dealing with a complex systems. It's possible to just use a printf, but the debugger gives more information. It's rare that I need to do stepping. I mostly just want to see the stack trace and the state of the program. One of the nice thing about Common Lisp and Smalltalk is to be able to do this any single point.
The conclusion I draw from this is that some debuggers are so bad it's not delivering value over "print debugging".
But perhaps it's a lack of knowing what a debugger can deliver.
A debugger gives you the ability to immediately dive in and instantly inspect the complete stack trace, all the values on the stack, all the values of local variables, etc. Without restarting the program or calling out specifically what you're going to want to inspect ahead of time.
A debugger will "pause the world" and let you see all the parallel stacks.
A debugger will let you set conditional breakpoints. If you need to debug the conditions for when a variable gets set to a particular value, a conditional breakpoint on the variable set to break when it's set to that particular value makes that a doddle.
A debugger will let you enumerate collections and re-write values on the fly.
A debugger will let you break on exceptions, even ones normally caught and handled.
A debugger can launch and attach itself.
All of that is a massive force-multiplier and time-saver, which print debugging doesn't deliver.
A debugger doesn't show you the evolution of your program over time. A few well placed prints give you that.
I use my debugger often, but sometimes you need to track the value of something over time (say, over 1000 iterations) and a debugger can't show you that.
So prints are still relevant. Debugger are more for "needle-in-haystack" stuff I think.
A debugger that could record the execution over time (and query that execution), that would be great. I know there are some, but are there for python for example ?
I've spent some quality time with debuggers but have come to the conclusion that it is a seductive way to spend time that doesn't necessarily get me there any faster than with printf or equivalent.
Admittedly, I mostly develop with sbcl and slime, so the judiciously place 'break' statement brings you to a stack trace.
Also with sbcl/slime, you can do ESC-. on a function and go to the actual source, even deep within the core of sbcl itself.
Nonetheless, I mostly depend on logging statements and print statements. When I need to go to python, print statements give most of what I need.
Debuggers are important tool, but not all debugger are good and not all problems require debugger. That's why I wrote a simple tool, which given a list of methods and classes will printf to log every invocation and exit of selected functions (via java reflection and function rewriting). It was much better than a normal debugger at finding actual flow of data in very complex multi-program system, so essentially machinegun-printf saved the day.
You can design a house on paper, but you need e.g. mallets and wheelbarrows to build it; you can design software with "tools for thought", more or less computerized, but you need the automation offered by CI, version control etc. to handle the more concrete aspects properly.
Thanks for pointing this out. In the same vein there are so many posts about productivity systems where people put endless amount of time into crafting their gtd notebooks with tabs and lists, etc. All that time spent to be productive instead of actually being productive. Or people describing their ideal Obsidian work flows instead of actually noting anything useful down in it. People writing about how they built their own blogging engine because their particular way of blogging is so unique that they had to hand-roll something. All that time spent on building a blog rather than blogging. (I've been there too).
I love "This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.". I will definitely steal this, let me put it in my notebook.
You see this everywhere. In sports its the people who spend most of their time worrying about their equipment instead of just playing the game. I was there with learning Chinese as well, spent way more time thinking about tools than actually learning the language.
The literal argument here is fine - using a notebook is antiquated and we have better tools.
But the sentiment holds true. When you're building software designing good code is the most fundamentally important aspect of your job. All the tools you mention are things that enable you to delivery that code, but if the design of the code itself is wrong then they mean very little. The process of designing code feels like a lost art these days; developers are far too happy to throw crap at a wall until enough of it sticks to pass the acceptance criteria. Going back to actually working out the logic and flow of the code (on paper, in a diagramming app, whatever) is missing for a vast amount of the dev community.
If people were happy to work through the logic of a feature before hitting their IDE and debugging the first thing they code up, maybe apps would be a bit less buggy.
> using a notebook is antiquated and we have better tools
Although I would agree that we have more modern tools, I'm not sure they're better along every dimension: pen and paper is better for memory retention than typing. Also, while YMMV, oen and paper works wonders for brainstorming for me.
Though admittedly search is easier with digital tools.
For fast, physically intuitive, flow-of-thought expression, there’s nothing like pen and paper, for me.
I throw away almost all my handwritten notes, because of the downsides: illegibility, unsearchability, physical bulk.
But the qualitative difference of thinking or reading +/- handwriting is huge. I don’t get caught up in editing. I can draw diagrams easily. It slows me down, makes me dwell on an idea while I’m writing it, and thereby physically calibrates my thought process.
> using a notebook is antiquated and we have better tools.
So far, I haven't found tools that beat pen and paper as tools for thinking _for me_.
I still do write a lot of digital notes too but I find that the flexibility of pen and paper — not to mention never having to worry about running out of battery compared to tablets or similar — crucial benefit.
Digital tools might result in better outputs but that's not what my notes are for. I prioritise minimising the friction that's between my thoughts and getting them on paper. On digital, I'm either limited by structure (f.ex. a Markdown file is limited by text being forced into lines) or having to change between tools when I want to jot down something in different format (text, circles, rectangles, arrows, whatever). It's a very small amount of work to switch between them but it cuts my thought because I need to think about the tools.
Pen and paper is the most direct connection my brain I've found.
Finally someone had the guts to say it. I see the same arguments again and again that writing in a notebook makes you remember things better and think more thoroughly, but who exactly was tested here? Were people with an extensive and deeply personal Zettelkasten note taking system added as participants in the studies? What was their note taking process? Most people severely underutilize or even misuse their digital tools. Just take a look at people who use Notion ;)
I iterate faster, have more freedom and information is displayed and manipulated in a more ergonomic way to me on a computer, in such a way that it creates a symbiotic relationship. I severely doubt physical notetaking and brainstorming could ever compare
Different people learn and work in different ways. To become comfortable with a new complex topic I personally have to work things out, with a pencil and an eraser, on a piece of paper.
And even writing software I often make toss-away paper sketches; they help me see things in a way that make sense to me. Not replacing a computer, but complementing it. I would not push my method on everyone but it works for me. I also think similar techniques are fairly common. People discuss ideas verbally. They take walks to let brain take a different view, etc. My 2c.
I see the same arguments again and again that writing in a notebook makes you remember things better and think more thoroughly, but who exactly was tested here?
Plenty of the research is online for you to answer your own question.
I would say that planning, analyzing and tracking is by far the most important part of engineering process, software or not.
I'm personally not a fan of pen and paper, I find it to not scale, I often change devices or I'm on the move, so I rely mostly on note apps (mostly Notion).
If you need a framework to do the job you were hired to perform then, clearly, that framework is the most important tool. You likely don’t exist professionally without it.
For people with higher confidence, those of us who have been around the block a few times, the article is correct. The supporting tools you mention are beneficial, but they aren’t the most important tool. The most important tool is soft skills and taking notes.
"Most important tool" depends on what you mean by "important". For TFA, it means the environment where most of the thinking is done. So it's a legitimate claim. If you want to restrict "important" to the most critical link in the development chain, I suppose you would have to choose the compiler.
Over generations, we'll get to where the software tools are relatively more important, but as of right now, it is almost a certainty that the quality of the software you write benefits from writing less code and relatively more of it with a paper draft that is based on carefully reading sources and documentation, and not from any other kind of tools investment.
The new stuff is often fast and many jobs need it by way of keeping up with the standard practices and creating a hiring filter, but it's a supplement, not a foundational tool for thought. It can't be all that important because it's constantly shifting.
Aaaa. I’d like to see stats over the comments—if management role, job history, age, income, education—and I’d expect opinions would be revealed as archetypical. In other words, it says more about the speaker than it says about successful software development.
Clearly the OP is talking about what works for them mentally—focus, creativity.
It’s a mistake for anyone to read a post like this and think of it (and the criticism) as prescriptive. Emulating any of the patterns would have the same result of cargo cult behavior.
All right, let me put it this way: As a developer, my most important tool is my brain. The time I spend figuring out what to build and how to build it is more important than just banging out some code.
For at least some people, stepping away from the keyboard may be the best way to do that thinking.
To put it in your own style: This isn't typing class, it's software engineering.
OP here. Last time my blog caught attention in HN, I was told I'm "living in a fantasy" and this time it's "pure romanticism".
The tools you shared are of course important and I enjoy having them a lot. Wouldn't want to work as a developer without version control or debuggers, for sure. Those are tools that if I lost them, it surely would slow me down and be annoying.
I do truly consider notebook more important to me than those. Writing and running code is the tool to get things done but software development to me is more importantly building something valuable that solves problems or makes life easier. And to that, code is often somewhat trivial implementation detail — it's much more important to figure out what to build and how.
Some people are good at thinking when they are in a code editor or other digital tools. My brain goes into detail implementation mode and it's hard for me to see the big picture when I'm writing in code editor and building functionality.
For me, it's crucial part of my job to take my notebook and use it as a tool for thinking before (and during!) coding. While losing access to the other tools would definitely slow me down, not being able to think through writing with pen and paper would cripple my thinking, my problem solving ability, my creativity and thus cause me writing bad software.
> Those are tools that if I lost them, it surely would slow me down and be annoying.
Yes, but the post above is pointing out that you would be significantly slower without an IDE, compiler or debugger than you would be without a pen/paper.
In fact, I don't think you would be a professional programmer if you didn't have them.
Saying you like a notebook and pen while designing and writing software is very different than saying a notebook and pen are more important than an IDE, compiler, or debugger.
> significantly slower without an IDE, compiler or debugger … In fact, I don't think you would be a professional programmer if you didn't have them.
This is a strange take. Programmers were around before any of those tools were. And today, even many professional programmers do their work without using any of them: they use text editors, they write interpreted languages, and they use printf()-debugging or other techniques.
They are examples, the exactness is not what is important here. Choosing something that is not connected to electricity, an OS, or the internet to be a software developer's _most important_ tool is, in fact, the strange position here.
Choosing something that is not connected to electricity, an OS, or the internet to be a software developer's _most important_ tool is, in fact, the strange position here.
Like a human brain? I'd say that is the programmer's most important tool, and it is not connected to electricity, an OS, or the internet.
Hmm, but doesn't the brain run on electricity? And why couldn't it possibly have something like an OS? I don't think we know exactly how the brain works
What about an issue tracker? Or requirements? Design and planning? A debugger doesn't help you design, version control doesn't tell you what you still need to do, and CI doesn't tell you you've implemented the requirements (or even that the requirements you think you have are the actual requirements).
As a developer my most important tools are a computer with working keyboard, monitor, and mouse. Everything else is secondary. A notebook and pen falls somewhere below cpu, gpu, hard drive, ram, reliable internet, etc.
I agree with parent comment of notebook and pen being pure romanticism. I mean, heck, I'd rate Obsidian or some other back linking note software as more important than a notebook and pen. A sticky note and pen would be even more important than a notebook and pen.
That and taking a shower, doing dishes or taking a walk around the block, in fact I'd say that the ratio of bugs/issues I've solved while away from the computer compared to being in front of the computer is quite high (in favour of the "away from the computer"-fixes, that is).
The balance of rest is an important factor that I’ve understood the value of only later in my career. Pausing on a difficult engineering task at the end of the workday in favor of exercise or cooking dinner (or both) gives my mind and body time to reset it needs. Often answers or alternate approaches will materialize mid curl, crunch, or vegetable chop.
This 100%. I was going to write something similar. In my entire 15 years in software engineering, the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison to the amount of times I've relied on version control or a debugger.
Has a notebook or a whiteboard been handy at times? Of course. But the rubber meets the road behind the IDE, and the tooling there is the story of the day.
> the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison
What kind of code do you work on?
I find notebooks useful all the time, but I write in C for embedded systems, so a lot of what I do involves setting up data structures, memory layout, etc.
I do/done a little bit of everything. Backend Java, mobile ObjC (iOS) and Java (Android). Spent 2 years as a firmware dev on NRF platform so very familiar with spending time on data structures and byte alignment. I’ve also spend 4 years doing TS/JS back in the early Angular days.
Everyone’s different I guess, but for me I’ve never really reached much for a notebook. I just start writing code, refactor as needed, and rely on tooling from debugger/IDE/devtools when and where applicable.
> the amount of times I've reached for a notebook pales in comparison to the amount of times I've relied on version control or a debugger.
In my now ~35 years of programming, I've found reaching for the notebook often saves me from needing to rely on a debugger unless it's code I inherited and didn't write myself. Even then, though, mapping it out on paper and using my pseudocode-shorthand to describe what the program does and what it intends to do is often faster than dealing with a debugger for anything but trivial bugs.
This is exactly my thought. Be it pen and paper or digital, writing out what your software needs to do and how it will do it saves an immense amount of time debugging or throwing things at the wall. I’m shocked at some of the responses here; there is a qualitative difference in the development experience when you spend the time designing (I also frequently do this by hand, but it doesn’t have to be) before implementing anything vs. opening an IDE and hammering something out.
I’d go further to say that software development isn’t about writing code, it’s about designing and understanding programs. Code is an implementation detail, the understanding is what is crucial.
What you're talking about is software machining, not software engineering.
The difference between the blue collar machinist and the white collar engineer is exactly this view of the machines they use.
For an engineer a machine - be in a slide rule, calculator or super computer - is just a tool. You're not doing engineering because you're using the tool. You're doing engineering because you're thinking and the tool helps you think a bit faster.
For a machinist the machine is the job. You can't make widgets if you don't have a machine to make them on. Thinking about widgets is pointless because they don't get made by thinking.
That’s funny, because if you go into any machine shop you’ll find machinists writing things down in notebooks (and probably cursing engineers who never set foot in the shop).
There are no more “old school” production lines left? I’m not sure what you mean; obviously there are a lot of production lines in the US, including the manufacturing of engine blocks as shown here.
Do you mean that they use robots today and therefore aren’t “old school”? That’s true in most industrialized economies.
Think of it this way: The brain outweighs those tools (for now). The notebook is an extension of thought and the brain.
Some of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s even used to "program" by handwriting code on paper as kind of a rough draft.
I did this particularly for systems I didn't have at home, like the Apple ][. I'd handwrite programs at home, then take it to school and type it into an Apple ][. This was somewhat common.
It's not romanticism and it's very important for me too. I spend a lot of my time drawing out what I'm trying to do before I actually try to do it. I tend to work on greenfield embedded projects though for context. Coding and debugging is hard to get good at and are obviously important, but you still need to figure what to actually build and those tools won't get you there. For me, I use a pen and paper to actually figure out what I need to do.
When trying to figure out what to code or how to solve a problem, pen and paper is too "concrete" for me for some reason. If I'm waiting for inspiration I would rather just go for a walk or pace back and forth or just stare at something (monitor, wall, whatever) and think it through. When I write something down (or especially when I type it into a document) it becomes too set in stone for me, and if I do it too much I get way too "close" to it to see the solution.
Pen and paper is more helpful when I'm trying to see how the solution I came up with fits into the code, at least for me. I can't visualize at all, so even basic things about how data flows will be helpful if I write them down. The more concrete I'm getting, the more I use pen and paper or text documents. Otherwise it's just give myself time to work through the code as I know it, thinking of things and discarding them quickly, and waiting for inspiration to strike.
I like writing much better,[1] and after a fair share of Moleskin, Field Notes, and a long streak with Muji, I’m now blown away by Midori. I have already gotten a few, and I’m going to get a lot more. The tactile ‘scratch’ of the fountain pen on the Midori Paper is so soothing, it makes me feel like I’m a poet even when I’m writing down the most mundane idea that I just had. :-)
Empathy is in short supply these days but especially on HN. Very strange to watch adult humans fail at basic theory of mind tests such as understanding that other people can have their own preferences
In my company if an engineer came out with this nonsense he would be placed on my special system of making his role so unpleasant to the extent that he leaves
It actually works. Every time I get stuck, writing things down helps me slow down, think more clearly, and move forward more steadily. Pen and notebook really are an underrated but essential part of being a developer.
Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.
I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful. If there's something worth noting down, then it goes into documentation, so others can stumble upon whatever quirk I've come across in the future. If there's something I really want to remember, I create flashcards and do spaced repetition until I've learned the thing. But that's just me, and I imagine my way doesn't work for a lot of people.
I think people are taking this post a little too personally and literally. This is a writer's piece. The title is meant to share a philosophy that this developer subscribes to. Nothing about it is declaring that others must subscribe to it as well.
If a pen and notebook don't work for you, then don't use it.
This is how my brain works. I do have a notebook. My stream of thoughts for one day go one one page for that day. I turn the page the next day and I almost never look back. There may be some value in looking back. But, I have not been able to make myself do it.
I'm sure it's very personal :) Because everyone has their own reality, workflow and reading a piece either resonates or dissonates with you (personally).
I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet".
On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.
But today's kids, being digital natives, may take a different approach. Paper&pen may present anxiety for them. So it very much depends on the family we grew up in.
Don’t try to transform a paper notebook into a database. All those organizational tools are elaborate forms of procrastination.
What I do is write notes in the best format for paper: an append-only log with a date on top. Whether digitally or on paper, I rarely if at all need to consult notes from a long time ago, so the log is good enough for most use cases. In fact, as I mentioned elsewhere, writing by hand is not to store data, it’s a way to effectively digest information and incorporate it into your brain. You’ll get a lot of benefit of writing something and immediately throwing it away, so who cares about indexing it for later.
On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.
I use a smart pen that writes in a notebook, but also stores everything I write in memory. Every month or so I export the content of the pen to my computer via Bluetooth as OCRed PDFs. This is because my boss often asks me to account for time I spend doing different things, and I can quickly search the PDFs.
Not the GP, but I got a Rocketbook from my most recent workplace when I joined. Not quite a smart pen, more like smart paper - each page is grid paper with a QR code at the bottom that you scan with their app to digitise.
Writing by hand also has a greater effect than typing because it engages more of the senses and more of the brain, in particular the motor cortex.
I keep telling myself that this would all make a great excuse to get a Moleskine, but handwriting just isn't a part of my workflow. Typing copious amounts of stuff into text buffers and then transforming it is, especially now that we have LLMs. If my brain is totally non-functional I simply start typing barely intelligible phrases into a text editor until it wakes up, then I go back and edit/refactor/clean up, and frequently something comes out of this that looks like a vague outline of an email or piece of code I need to write that day. Or at least a todo list. Then we're off to the races doing actual work. Most of the initial doodling is destroyed.
Unscientifically I always assumed that the pencil-and-paper was not really the important part, just the ritual of memorization that modern people have from however many years of schooling. I assumed the important part was the ritual.
I guess we have a large enough population of people who’ve always taken notes on their computers that a natural experiment could have occurred. But I wonder about the crosstabs—computers can be very distracting so I wonder if people who prefer them to notebooks will also just tend to be more distracted.
My handwriting was terrible all throughout school, and then I avoided it pretty much entirely for a decade or two. I'm not sure what's left can really be called handwriting. I guess maybe it still works to help recall, but it's barely useful as reference.
FWIW My handwriting (and the experience of writing) improved quite a bit when I switched to fountain pens. I always used to find writing a bit uncomfortable physically, and difficult mentally (due to ADHD) but fountain pens improved the experience somewhat.
You don’t need so much force to be applied to the pen compared to other writing instruments and the more comfortable writing experience helped my ADHD brain better tolerate it to.
>I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful
Same, but I still keep them (both notebooks and random pieces of paper). I find it extremely satisfying to just look into them after many years. It's like looking at random old photos, photos of my thinking process from the past.
> They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.
That's the most important takeaway from using pen(cil) and paper. If you can make it reusable for you great but the most important thing is physically writing it down.
I rarely, if ever, keep anything I have written down in the notebook. Eventually, I rip it out and shred it.
I've used printer paper myself in different jobs in science. I personally don't like it but I have done it when it was the only paper available. Budgets in scientific organizations are often very tight, so often nothing else is provided, and many times you do not have the direct authority to order anything yourself.
My point is that I'd view this behavior more as a consequence of the circumstances many scientists find themselves in rather than a conscious choice, though I do admit that some people may like it more than I do.
I don't have an exact preference on the kind and weight of the paper, but I do prefer notebooks with firmly bound and numbered pages like old-school laboratory notebooks [1]. My problem is that I often do long derivations or work that can span dozens of pages with diagrams, etc. If I use loose leaf paper like printer paper, I often lose track of pages or their order. I tend to label my pages extensively when I have to use printer paper. I also use binder clips instead of paper clips since they are much more secure. That system works for me but other people might not like it.
Notebooks are cool, but I prefer printer paper for short term notes. I tend to staple them together if there's more than a few pages. If I need to remember something for longer than the few weeks before I lose the sheets, I take a picture with my phone.
I used to use fancy watermarked paper just because it was fun, but then I got a job at a place with supply closets stocked with infinite printer paper, and, best of all - 11x17 printer paper! I got a 11x17 clipboard to go with it and been using that ever since.
For me it's critical that the note capture mechanism be unstructured and entirely free form. Typing notes on a keyboard just doesn't work when much of the things I need to keep note of are non-linear, non-verbal, relational, or spatial. Or just facts that I need to keep in temp memory.
I periodically review the notes and summarize anything worth keeping into the appropriate system of record (calendar, tickets, wiki, spaced repetition, doesn't matter). Like you, I find that very little is actually worth keeping. And that's fine; the paper notes are not a system of record but more of an extension of working memory.
I used to do this very intentionally. In the past, I've found that taking notes is very valuable for me, but having notes seldom is.
When I was in school, I would write all my notes on a dry erase board and simply erase it when I had filled up the page. That was when I was studying things that were already known, though, so it was viable to, for reference material, just become skilled at referencing pre-existing reference material.
Now that I'm a professional and often working on something new or combining things in a new way, it's more often useful to me to generate new reference content for myself and especially for a different person who picks up the task on my day off.
>>Some of the most intelligent people I've ever met in math, physics, and computer science don't even use a notebook. They use printer paper and pen. When they're done, they throw the paper away.
Donald Knuth works that way. In fact, most such people tend to do most of their thinking on paper, making small changes to the problem state, verifying if it sticks, and is going where they want it going. Rollback, make a different change to the same thing, or same change to different things. This goes on over hundreds of pages.
One of the advanced user level performers don't tend to view stationary(especially paper) as something that must be rationed or spent with limits.
I have tried both. Going fully digital and fully notebook oriented. The best I have come up with is to have long term notes in a note app but your on going current thought process in a book. Like what you are currently doing or it's process.
This helps with the search and copy issue of going physical. But writing things for your ongoing process / tasks makes you remember things so much better. Sometimes, all I have to do is write. I don't have refer them. But if I have to, I usually have a better sense of how I got to the end result cos I have the journey written down in my notebook. Also being a fountain pen lover helps.
You must choose one side or the other, and fully commit to it (like everyone else in this comment section). But it's too late now, since you've already tried both sides (fully digital and fully notebook) with an open mind, that means your opinion is automatically invalid and wrong.
I thought so too. But I would rather use docstrings and comments because:
- Readable by LLMs/others in the context of the code
- Searchable
- Version controlled
I have been writing software for about 20 years (following on from OChem PhD and research for a few years). I am 'senior' and get paid plenty in Oz...
I have aphantasia - I can't visualise/picture things in my mind, so I use pen and paper or whiteboards A LOT!
I create various ERDs, mind maps, sequence diagrams etc. I use a ReMarkable which makes it a bit easier to move stuff around and makes it more effective.
I get that some people might think it is 'pure romanticism', but pen and paper has been crucial for my success.
Most humans cannot visualize too many things in their minds at one time. I think the limit is low on average. We all therefore benefit from pen and paper. But I recognize that some more than others.
Same boat - 20 years experience, in Oz, with aphantasia... I've only realise in the past month that I do poorly on Live Coding interviews because since the interview is on the clock I immediately start coding so I have something to show, but since I can't picture anything in my minds eye I'm literally coding blind - rereading the question over and over hoping the solution will come! So after realising this I've started using an A2 notebook to draw out the problem, work my way through the problem on paper, and finally map out a solution (still on paper)
... then like magic, the code comes naturally (I'm guessing that's how normal people think when programming)!
Endless printer paper or doted A4 paper (I love it). It is is the planing area of my brain. Some specific notes are kept for long term and re-used, which is seldom - this can (should) moved into a moleskin. Probably I should use the moleskin more? I need a pen or pencil, on paper to plan.
Long Term Storage
I don't use it to think. Mostly digital, Markdown. Stored on my filesystem, Git or IMAP. Avoiding all weird and soon defunct commercial things.
I want to ask developers here who keep and maintain notebooks: How exactly do you take notes? What things do you write down? And how does it help you, or how has it made you a better developer?
OP's post also references a similar post [0], but I am curious to hear from the people here.
I don't tend to use it extensively, but I find it much easier to work out things, especially graphical things, when I can doodle it on some paper rather than having to type it into notepad. For example, yesterday I was working out how to generate a mesh of triangles and needed to work out the vertex indices. It was quicker to doodle a net of triangles and note number them than to try and do it on the computer. It's probably because I'm a very visual thinker. It's also easier to work out an equation on paper than on a computer when I've got fractions and powers and stuff that are annoying at best to represent in plain text
As in "the most important accessory beyond a computer and a text editor", I absolutely agree for how I work and think.
Nothing I have tried comes close. No iPad, writing code directly, talking it through, thinking it through, sketching it out on whatever drawing tool you might like. Pencil and paper are all I want.
Now, let's argue about our favourite colours and why teal is objectively the best.
I understand the sentiment, but I don't get how you could draw more complex software plans by hand. I usually use Draw.io/Diagrams.net, and the drawings get pretty large and need reorganizing dozens of boxes several times while planning the architecture.
OTOH if the plan is very simple and obvious, and can be drawn out in one go, it doesn't really need a diagram in the first place, so I skip spending time drawing the obvious stuff.
I don't often do very complex software plans like that. My working notes are often on a smaller scale like individual features or so. If we need to document the full architecture for the project, I'm happy to do that with digital tools.
But while I'm planning parts of it or designing it, I do better with pen and paper. My main issue with many of the digital tools I've tried comes down to the added friction if I need to switch to a different tool in the app when I switch between circles and rectangles and text and the fact that I find free-hand drawing with mouse really difficult.
> OTOH if the plan is very simple and obvious, and can be drawn out in one go, it doesn't really need a diagram in the first place, so I skip spending time drawing the obvious stuff.
I think there's a middle ground where it might be easy to draw on one go but deciding what to draw and how things work together and what's needed requires iterations and for that, thinking through drawing and writing helps me a ton.
I guess there's many cases where you don't really know how complicated or simple the solution will end up to be, and start drawing it while thinking about it.. I must admit that those are usually the most interesting parts of the work.
I actually do all this stuff in my head and use hierarchies of bullet points in a text file to externalize some stuff. Some of these may end in arrows that point to a different process.
I never use paper because I'm always moving these bullet points around and inserting stuff between them. Apps are too slow.
I never write down all the information because these notes are enough for me to reload everything. It's pretty easy to see that I didn't write something when there's a gap in my notes. I never wrote it down because I'm going to come up with the same or better solution quickly.
This isn't really helpful for anyone else and doesn't work well with pair programming.
For me, pen/pencil and paper is for throwaway notes when I need to distil an idea down or slow my thinking to focus on something I can't quite reason about in my head fully. It's more of an unloading mechanism that gives me more space to think than my head allows alone. It's not actually something I use for note taking at all, for this I tend to just use OneNote/Obsidian/Confluence (whatever I need to at the time).
I would like to explore using stuff like Zettlekastan note systems with emacs a bit more for actually holding onto a web of knowledge that I refer to. Though this is a different ends, and so requires a different means.
> I learned very early on in my career that I’m not very good at thinking when I’m at a computer.
Before personal computers, I had the same experience at the typewriter. I find it very inhibiting to have a machine staring me in the face, waiting, while I try to be creative.
Most comments are focusing on the physical pen and paper aspect of this post, but are missing the underlying principle:
The author uses pen and paper because when they sit down at a computer they end up shifting to "function mode" where they're implementing rather than designing.
That's it.
The important takeaway is to make sure you don't fall into the trap of implementing when you should be designing. How you maintain that balance is up to you.
Exactly! So happy to read you managed to pick up the core gist of the story.
It's important to find the tools that work best for YOU.
I partially wanted to write this because I've often felt as an outsider in tech teams where everyone sits at a computer 7.5 hours every day and I'm the one thinking better when I'm away from the screen and keyboard. So I wanted to offer an example to those who are like me and also feel like they might not belong.
I used computers for a lot longer than 7.5 hours a day. Doubly so since I got a home desktop with a tablet display and 3 other screens. I find that the reason why productivity in offices is so low is that:
1). The available screen real estate for doing work is tiny.
2). The tools people use have happy paths that force you to work a specific way.
3). Deep thinking is impossible with interruptions.
As an example of a tool which works best on computers, I've finally recreated the literate environment I used at a previous job on my own time and from scratch: https://olive-alayne-28.tiiny.site/
I can now work happily with Emacs in an environment that supports deep thinking about code instead of fighting with it every step of the way.
If you're interested [1] and [3] from that paper are great introductions to literate programming and noweb + emacs + synctex is by far the most pleasant IDE I've ever used.
I also can't rave enough about how well pen tablets work with xournalpp these days. I can take notes on top of multi-thousand page printouts of code bases and rearrange, doodle, remix, and add new pages wherever I feel like. Even five years ago there was no tool that would let you do that without the threat of a major crash is you wrote too fast.
There’s a good insight in there about preserving your process of arriving at a conclusion, but it’s better done in obsidian or notion or something like that.
I still have my notebook with the notes and drooling from my machine learning class back in college. I remember drawing nodes and connections to wrap my head around hidden layers, weights and all that. It is definitely super helpful to take notes and draw stuff when you're a dealing with a complex subject.
301 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadTo me, if the problem is too complex, or more likely, if I expect to be distracted by family and chores, "building in my head" is not the best option as it all falls apart and need to build it up from scratch (though admittedly faster than last time).
I wholeheartedly agree with the author. I find it really hard to think deeply at a computer. Too many distractions.
The speed of writing and search isn't a problem for me. With the writing, I wish I could write faster, but deep thinking isn't fast anyway.
Search, well, 99% of what I write is never looked at again. It's all a process of working things out, committing stuff to memory.
Whenever I'm stuck, stepping away from the computer is usually the best way forward.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/11/23/why-writing-by-hand-is...
Writing by hand definitely is better for a squirrel brain like me. And searching is overrated, most note-taking is write-only and tends to accumulate without anyone ever reading it back. So optimize for memory retention so you can later form better mental associations with the material, rather than how searchable on a computer it is. Notes on a PC are inert, what you want is to integrate their contents into your brain so you can actually do something with it.
It is absolutely the wrong tool for any long-term information store. Ephemeral think-it-through process notes only. Obsidian for anything that should live longer than the current problem I’m trying to solve.
Also: I just like writing.
That notebook is the fastest most accessible tool to capture my thoughts. I can state concisely what was discussed in a team meeting last october before any notetaking tool boots up. I know kids names, birthdays and favorite movies of almost all my coworkers which I can glance without switching windows while sharing my screen.
the impossibility of such content being legible to anyone else and being shared is a feature I value very highly.
i take it where i want, introspect, take notes. No screen. No distractions. I doodle, draw lines, write jokes, whatever.
Pages on the right are work things. On the left are my ideas. Index on the first page tells me exactly where to turn to for that idea and mockups i had on filling tedious forms.
I know when I'm spinning my wheels. I can see the gaps in my thinking from months ago. I can see patterns in human behavior that I would otherwise have not noticed.
The simplicity is a huge advantage. I stopped looking for anything better. I don't try to promote it either (except on rare occasions). Saved me hours.
first page is always for index, split vertically and you get roughly 80 entries with about 3-4 words each. one for each page that i number as i go writing through the book. index usually has just pointers to days when i get interesting ideas.
each right page is for 1 week that i label up top. a small margin is dedicated for recurring meetings. using only the right side allows quickly flipping through. rest of the page is for todos and logs.
left pages are for related thoughts, ideas, etc from that week. sometimes overflows but not by much.
For wordy stuff, i use pages from the back of the book. I don't use sentences much. Just few words with lines connecting them.
Thats pretty much it - index, numbered pages and using just the right side per week. It works wonders for how simple it is. You'll find something else that works for you. Don't overthink this. Just start with a structure and let it evolve.
side note - i do use a folder for plain text notes on my work laptop (that i keep open in sublime) for links and text that benefits from copy and paste. i would not care if it all got deleted or leaked out to the world. I also have another folder of interesting bookmarks and articles exported to pdf for reading on a flight on my phone. i have a dozen or so google docs with my thoughts on topics i'm interested in.
I'm currently looking at a stack of lovely "Leuchtturm1917" A5 note books. The way I took notes for the last three years has been chaotic, that's why I was interested in your way of doing them. I think, finding a mode of work and let it grow and iterate over time is the way to go. I see room for improvement with regards to how I structure my notes, so that I can find them again - that's what I'm struggeling with in my analog world. So, thanks for your insights, they are really valuable!
I type much faster on a keyboard, I can read it even a month from now while I can't do that with my own handwriting, and when I make a mistake, I can quickly and easily correct it.
I my books, I use Tipp-Ex for that. I usually write with a ballpoint pen.
I often browse my notes even when I'm not looking for anything. I read what I've been thinking previously because that often sparks new ideas and thoughts.
One thing where I find pen and paper superior to digital is that it's easy to write in the margins, draw arrows and annotate. When I got my first iPad and tested out digital notebook tools (with stylus), I was excited about the idea that I can resize and move my existing drawings around.
Then it took me a few days to notice that I don't really ever need that. I don't need my "finished" notes to look tidy or good. I got over the need to have organised and structured notebooks and embraced the chaos.
I guess it's different things for different people. For me, the flexibility of paper is superior to any digital solution because it has the shortest "input lag" or "feedback loop" to my brain. I'm happy to sacrifice other potential benefits for that.
We're still not there yet, even with the latest addition of (muted) colour.
They're great I guess for reading and annotating PDFs (ugh). But so is a (laser) printer.
To me, none of the qualities you listed matter when it comes to sketching ideas, thinking about problems, staying on track while problem solving. When I'm done with the task, I read through my notes once and throw it out.
It serves the same purpose as the lab notebook does for a researcher.
The notebook doesn't take up significant room. If you still have a space problem, run it through a scanner.
It's remarkable how much of the lecture you'll remember. And when you read your handwritten notes, you'll remember the lecture that went with it.
In retrospect, I sorely wished I had set up a cassette recorder and recorded all the audio. It would be a gold mine today, as all those lectures are lost to time.
On the other hand, I had no money to buy cassette tapes at the time.
My favorite pens at the time were the Pilot pens. Today I love the Tul pens.
I have long since scanned them all in. I should post them on my website, just for fun.
Then go over the notes later and summarise or add details on those left hand pages. I used to do the colour pen/highlighting then.
Worked for me half a century ago. No data format problems or need for legacy hardware either.
Jokes aside, I often used to take notes only on the left side because of it, and sometimes the right side, except upside down.
If you need to draw approximate diagrams, or formulae, or flows, or trees, or whatever else, instead...
I use an automatic scanner to store the important papers as documentation. Now you can even send those to gemini or google cloud to digitalise it for cheap.
At any given time I have four sheets of paper over my desk that I can see in parallel, but I could have 8 or 10 for complex problems with areas equivalent to engineering or architectural blueprints.
Having said that, I can draw and paint very well as I was interested since childhood and had formal training. Probably is not for everyone, but it is for me.
> It's slow to write
Only to an extent. I write fast enough with pen and paper that my thinking is the bottleneck — which isn't really that fast. I don't need to write down everything I think so it also acts as a filter and processor of those thoughts.
> insanely slow to search what you've written
Compared to digital notes system, sure. But the way I use my notes, I don't usually need a full-text search to find stuff. I remember what I've been working on, I often browse through my notebooks to revisit ideas and most often these notebook notes are kind of a "working copy" where the search relevance is often just for the feature so it only needs to be fast to search for a few days or weeks.
I also do copy many of my notes down in digital format too when there's something worth capturing for long term storage for the sake of searching for example.
> almost impossible to copy or share
100%. Sharing is not a consideration for me, these are my raw pure thoughts and explorations, they don't often make much sense to other people as-is. Sometimes I may take a photo of a UI sketch or something to share if needed but otherwise when I have something to share, I write it based on my notes rather than sharing my notes as they are.
I typically get through a couple of B5 pages a day, so homing in on the thing I want to look at is a matter of opening the notebook to roughly the right fortnight and then flicking through up to a dozen pages in either direction. A tenth of a second per page is enough to scan for major events - what projects was I working on at the time? Were there any major interruptions to my flow, or changes in direction?
And then, once I've found the right day, seeing the detail of everything I was doing at the time triggers a flood of memories - I remember all of the conversations, decisions, problems, and ideas that were current at the time of the entry in question.
I've tried a number of digital notetaking systems, but none has been able to give me so much context so quickly as a paper notebook.
that's probably the most important thing. it forces you to slow down and think it through and actually absorb it.
Searching what I have written in the past would be useless for me because it wouldn't necessarily make sense. It's more about the physically writing it out.
That's not to say I don't also use debuggers when necessary, I just reserve those for very hairy problems that can't be solved any other way, e.g. stepping into dependencies. Let's not forget that debuggers have their limitations too, e.g. release build GC optimization (or indeed any release-only bug), and any init process where you have to attach the debugger after the startup, fundamentally cannot be debugged using debuggers.
Linus Torvalds:
> I don't like debuggers. Never have, probably never will. I use gdb all the time, but I tend to use it not as a debugger, but as a disassembler on steroids that you can program.
> I don't think kernel development should be "easy". I do not condone single-stepping through code to find the bug. I do not think that extra visibility into the system is necessarily a good thing.
> Oh. And sure, when things crash and you fsck and you didn't even get a clue about what went wrong, you get frustrated. Tough. There are two kinds of reactions to that: you start being careful, or you start whining about a kernel debugger.
> I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger. I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different _level_.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/9/6/65
And I agree. At least for me, print debugging goes a long way, and I'm already invested in building mental models about code. I think using a proper debugger has to be the last resort, because nothing else works and it's time to get into the ugly details. Two valuable avenues for producing good code are formal verification (and its ilk, such as specification) and horse sense/common sense, which combine to say that we should have rigorous mental models that impose on our code. That's the primary objective, to me. The use of tools such as debuggers is secondary, and in my experience, largely neutral or harmful. There's the classic caveat of "if your goal is to ship code fast, then this isn't practical", which is fair, but I have some things to say about shucking off that culture.
But perhaps it's a lack of knowing what a debugger can deliver.
A debugger gives you the ability to immediately dive in and instantly inspect the complete stack trace, all the values on the stack, all the values of local variables, etc. Without restarting the program or calling out specifically what you're going to want to inspect ahead of time.
A debugger will "pause the world" and let you see all the parallel stacks.
A debugger will let you set conditional breakpoints. If you need to debug the conditions for when a variable gets set to a particular value, a conditional breakpoint on the variable set to break when it's set to that particular value makes that a doddle.
A debugger will let you enumerate collections and re-write values on the fly.
A debugger will let you break on exceptions, even ones normally caught and handled.
A debugger can launch and attach itself.
All of that is a massive force-multiplier and time-saver, which print debugging doesn't deliver.
I use my debugger often, but sometimes you need to track the value of something over time (say, over 1000 iterations) and a debugger can't show you that.
So prints are still relevant. Debugger are more for "needle-in-haystack" stuff I think.
A debugger that could record the execution over time (and query that execution), that would be great. I know there are some, but are there for python for example ?
Do you mind providing examples? I’m not sure what I would search to find that and I’m interested in the idea.
Admittedly, I mostly develop with sbcl and slime, so the judiciously place 'break' statement brings you to a stack trace.
Also with sbcl/slime, you can do ESC-. on a function and go to the actual source, even deep within the core of sbcl itself.
Nonetheless, I mostly depend on logging statements and print statements. When I need to go to python, print statements give most of what I need.
You can design a house on paper, but you need e.g. mallets and wheelbarrows to build it; you can design software with "tools for thought", more or less computerized, but you need the automation offered by CI, version control etc. to handle the more concrete aspects properly.
I love "This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.". I will definitely steal this, let me put it in my notebook.
But the sentiment holds true. When you're building software designing good code is the most fundamentally important aspect of your job. All the tools you mention are things that enable you to delivery that code, but if the design of the code itself is wrong then they mean very little. The process of designing code feels like a lost art these days; developers are far too happy to throw crap at a wall until enough of it sticks to pass the acceptance criteria. Going back to actually working out the logic and flow of the code (on paper, in a diagramming app, whatever) is missing for a vast amount of the dev community.
If people were happy to work through the logic of a feature before hitting their IDE and debugging the first thing they code up, maybe apps would be a bit less buggy.
Although I would agree that we have more modern tools, I'm not sure they're better along every dimension: pen and paper is better for memory retention than typing. Also, while YMMV, oen and paper works wonders for brainstorming for me.
Though admittedly search is easier with digital tools.
I throw away almost all my handwritten notes, because of the downsides: illegibility, unsearchability, physical bulk.
But the qualitative difference of thinking or reading +/- handwriting is huge. I don’t get caught up in editing. I can draw diagrams easily. It slows me down, makes me dwell on an idea while I’m writing it, and thereby physically calibrates my thought process.
So far, I haven't found tools that beat pen and paper as tools for thinking _for me_.
I still do write a lot of digital notes too but I find that the flexibility of pen and paper — not to mention never having to worry about running out of battery compared to tablets or similar — crucial benefit.
Digital tools might result in better outputs but that's not what my notes are for. I prioritise minimising the friction that's between my thoughts and getting them on paper. On digital, I'm either limited by structure (f.ex. a Markdown file is limited by text being forced into lines) or having to change between tools when I want to jot down something in different format (text, circles, rectangles, arrows, whatever). It's a very small amount of work to switch between them but it cuts my thought because I need to think about the tools.
Pen and paper is the most direct connection my brain I've found.
I iterate faster, have more freedom and information is displayed and manipulated in a more ergonomic way to me on a computer, in such a way that it creates a symbiotic relationship. I severely doubt physical notetaking and brainstorming could ever compare
? It's the (mostly anonymous) internet and not linkedin. People call these things out all the time?
And even writing software I often make toss-away paper sketches; they help me see things in a way that make sense to me. Not replacing a computer, but complementing it. I would not push my method on everyone but it works for me. I also think similar techniques are fairly common. People discuss ideas verbally. They take walks to let brain take a different view, etc. My 2c.
Plenty of the research is online for you to answer your own question.
I'm personally not a fan of pen and paper, I find it to not scale, I often change devices or I'm on the move, so I rely mostly on note apps (mostly Notion).
For people with higher confidence, those of us who have been around the block a few times, the article is correct. The supporting tools you mention are beneficial, but they aren’t the most important tool. The most important tool is soft skills and taking notes.
The new stuff is often fast and many jobs need it by way of keeping up with the standard practices and creating a hiring filter, but it's a supplement, not a foundational tool for thought. It can't be all that important because it's constantly shifting.
Nice slap down.
Aaaa. I’d like to see stats over the comments—if management role, job history, age, income, education—and I’d expect opinions would be revealed as archetypical. In other words, it says more about the speaker than it says about successful software development.
Clearly the OP is talking about what works for them mentally—focus, creativity.
It’s a mistake for anyone to read a post like this and think of it (and the criticism) as prescriptive. Emulating any of the patterns would have the same result of cargo cult behavior.
For at least some people, stepping away from the keyboard may be the best way to do that thinking.
To put it in your own style: This isn't typing class, it's software engineering.
The tools you shared are of course important and I enjoy having them a lot. Wouldn't want to work as a developer without version control or debuggers, for sure. Those are tools that if I lost them, it surely would slow me down and be annoying.
I do truly consider notebook more important to me than those. Writing and running code is the tool to get things done but software development to me is more importantly building something valuable that solves problems or makes life easier. And to that, code is often somewhat trivial implementation detail — it's much more important to figure out what to build and how.
Some people are good at thinking when they are in a code editor or other digital tools. My brain goes into detail implementation mode and it's hard for me to see the big picture when I'm writing in code editor and building functionality.
For me, it's crucial part of my job to take my notebook and use it as a tool for thinking before (and during!) coding. While losing access to the other tools would definitely slow me down, not being able to think through writing with pen and paper would cripple my thinking, my problem solving ability, my creativity and thus cause me writing bad software.
Yes, but the post above is pointing out that you would be significantly slower without an IDE, compiler or debugger than you would be without a pen/paper. In fact, I don't think you would be a professional programmer if you didn't have them.
Saying you like a notebook and pen while designing and writing software is very different than saying a notebook and pen are more important than an IDE, compiler, or debugger.
Slower at creating what? With just great tooling there is still a real risk of creating the wrong thing just very fast.
OP's point is that it is a thinking tool more so than a creating tool.
This is a strange take. Programmers were around before any of those tools were. And today, even many professional programmers do their work without using any of them: they use text editors, they write interpreted languages, and they use printf()-debugging or other techniques.
Like a human brain? I'd say that is the programmer's most important tool, and it is not connected to electricity, an OS, or the internet.
When people criticize like that, you know you’re doing something right. “Only people doing less than you will criticize “
Keep it up!
I agree with parent comment of notebook and pen being pure romanticism. I mean, heck, I'd rate Obsidian or some other back linking note software as more important than a notebook and pen. A sticky note and pen would be even more important than a notebook and pen.
(Maybe it’s different in modern college classes now but wasn’t for decades.)
(Maybe it’s different in modern college classes now but wasn’t for decades.)
/Old enough to have heard, "OK, now put away your slide rules…"
"when building a house, obviously a hammer is more important than the _paper_ blueprints. This isn't art class, it's construction".
(when digital notes/digital blueprints are an available option)
Has a notebook or a whiteboard been handy at times? Of course. But the rubber meets the road behind the IDE, and the tooling there is the story of the day.
What kind of code do you work on?
I find notebooks useful all the time, but I write in C for embedded systems, so a lot of what I do involves setting up data structures, memory layout, etc.
Everyone’s different I guess, but for me I’ve never really reached much for a notebook. I just start writing code, refactor as needed, and rely on tooling from debugger/IDE/devtools when and where applicable.
In my now ~35 years of programming, I've found reaching for the notebook often saves me from needing to rely on a debugger unless it's code I inherited and didn't write myself. Even then, though, mapping it out on paper and using my pseudocode-shorthand to describe what the program does and what it intends to do is often faster than dealing with a debugger for anything but trivial bugs.
I’d go further to say that software development isn’t about writing code, it’s about designing and understanding programs. Code is an implementation detail, the understanding is what is crucial.
The difference between the blue collar machinist and the white collar engineer is exactly this view of the machines they use.
For an engineer a machine - be in a slide rule, calculator or super computer - is just a tool. You're not doing engineering because you're using the tool. You're doing engineering because you're thinking and the tool helps you think a bit faster.
For a machinist the machine is the job. You can't make widgets if you don't have a machine to make them on. Thinking about widgets is pointless because they don't get made by thinking.
Do you mean that they use robots today and therefore aren’t “old school”? That’s true in most industrialized economies.
Some of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s even used to "program" by handwriting code on paper as kind of a rough draft.
I did this particularly for systems I didn't have at home, like the Apple ][. I'd handwrite programs at home, then take it to school and type it into an Apple ][. This was somewhat common.
Pen and paper is more helpful when I'm trying to see how the solution I came up with fits into the code, at least for me. I can't visualize at all, so even basic things about how data flows will be helpful if I write them down. The more concrete I'm getting, the more I use pen and paper or text documents. Otherwise it's just give myself time to work through the code as I know it, thinking of things and discarding them quickly, and waiting for inspiration to strike.
https://brajeshwar.com/2025/notes/
But when I really need to think I upgrade to pen and paper.
Is it really that difficult to imagine that what does not work for you might work for someone else?
In my company if an engineer came out with this nonsense he would be placed on my special system of making his role so unpleasant to the extent that he leaves
https://hamatti.org/posts/how-i-take-work-notes-as-a-develop...
Multiplayer mind mapping; idea organization; clear understanding for all; fast reorg; sequential and/or parallel flows or concepts; etc etc.
The worst part is having large calls watch me misspell things and fumble to correct it on a shared screen.
I have seldom found personal notes from far in the past to be useful. If there's something worth noting down, then it goes into documentation, so others can stumble upon whatever quirk I've come across in the future. If there's something I really want to remember, I create flashcards and do spaced repetition until I've learned the thing. But that's just me, and I imagine my way doesn't work for a lot of people.
I think people are taking this post a little too personally and literally. This is a writer's piece. The title is meant to share a philosophy that this developer subscribes to. Nothing about it is declaring that others must subscribe to it as well.
If a pen and notebook don't work for you, then don't use it.
I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet".
On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.
But today's kids, being digital natives, may take a different approach. Paper&pen may present anxiety for them. So it very much depends on the family we grew up in.
What I do is write notes in the best format for paper: an append-only log with a date on top. Whether digitally or on paper, I rarely if at all need to consult notes from a long time ago, so the log is good enough for most use cases. In fact, as I mentioned elsewhere, writing by hand is not to store data, it’s a way to effectively digest information and incorporate it into your brain. You’ll get a lot of benefit of writing something and immediately throwing it away, so who cares about indexing it for later.
I use a smart pen that writes in a notebook, but also stores everything I write in memory. Every month or so I export the content of the pen to my computer via Bluetooth as OCRed PDFs. This is because my boss often asks me to account for time I spend doing different things, and I can quickly search the PDFs.
Here's one of the hundreds of articles about this, it's a very well documented phenomenon https://www.newscientist.com/article/2414241-writing-things-...
Writing by hand also has a greater effect than typing because it engages more of the senses and more of the brain, in particular the motor cortex.
I keep telling myself that this would all make a great excuse to get a Moleskine, but handwriting just isn't a part of my workflow. Typing copious amounts of stuff into text buffers and then transforming it is, especially now that we have LLMs. If my brain is totally non-functional I simply start typing barely intelligible phrases into a text editor until it wakes up, then I go back and edit/refactor/clean up, and frequently something comes out of this that looks like a vague outline of an email or piece of code I need to write that day. Or at least a todo list. Then we're off to the races doing actual work. Most of the initial doodling is destroyed.
Handwriting does aid retention though.
I guess we have a large enough population of people who’ve always taken notes on their computers that a natural experiment could have occurred. But I wonder about the crosstabs—computers can be very distracting so I wonder if people who prefer them to notebooks will also just tend to be more distracted.
You don’t need so much force to be applied to the pen compared to other writing instruments and the more comfortable writing experience helped my ADHD brain better tolerate it to.
Same, but I still keep them (both notebooks and random pieces of paper). I find it extremely satisfying to just look into them after many years. It's like looking at random old photos, photos of my thinking process from the past.
That's the most important takeaway from using pen(cil) and paper. If you can make it reusable for you great but the most important thing is physically writing it down.
I rarely, if ever, keep anything I have written down in the notebook. Eventually, I rip it out and shred it.
My point is that I'd view this behavior more as a consequence of the circumstances many scientists find themselves in rather than a conscious choice, though I do admit that some people may like it more than I do.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38772707
Occasionally i'll write something down that I know I'll forget for later reference and put a small post-it sticking out for easy access.
I periodically review the notes and summarize anything worth keeping into the appropriate system of record (calendar, tickets, wiki, spaced repetition, doesn't matter). Like you, I find that very little is actually worth keeping. And that's fine; the paper notes are not a system of record but more of an extension of working memory.
I am thinking about trying to do something with this like scanning for connections between notes or adding some tags to make ideas easier to find.
I used to do this very intentionally. In the past, I've found that taking notes is very valuable for me, but having notes seldom is.
When I was in school, I would write all my notes on a dry erase board and simply erase it when I had filled up the page. That was when I was studying things that were already known, though, so it was viable to, for reference material, just become skilled at referencing pre-existing reference material.
Now that I'm a professional and often working on something new or combining things in a new way, it's more often useful to me to generate new reference content for myself and especially for a different person who picks up the task on my day off.
Donald Knuth works that way. In fact, most such people tend to do most of their thinking on paper, making small changes to the problem state, verifying if it sticks, and is going where they want it going. Rollback, make a different change to the same thing, or same change to different things. This goes on over hundreds of pages.
One of the advanced user level performers don't tend to view stationary(especially paper) as something that must be rationed or spent with limits.
This helps with the search and copy issue of going physical. But writing things for your ongoing process / tasks makes you remember things so much better. Sometimes, all I have to do is write. I don't have refer them. But if I have to, I usually have a better sense of how I got to the end result cos I have the journey written down in my notebook. Also being a fountain pen lover helps.
You must choose one side or the other, and fully commit to it (like everyone else in this comment section). But it's too late now, since you've already tried both sides (fully digital and fully notebook) with an open mind, that means your opinion is automatically invalid and wrong.
Them's the rules.
I have aphantasia - I can't visualise/picture things in my mind, so I use pen and paper or whiteboards A LOT!
I create various ERDs, mind maps, sequence diagrams etc. I use a ReMarkable which makes it a bit easier to move stuff around and makes it more effective.
I get that some people might think it is 'pure romanticism', but pen and paper has been crucial for my success.
... then like magic, the code comes naturally (I'm guessing that's how normal people think when programming)!
Work In Progress
Endless printer paper or doted A4 paper (I love it). It is is the planing area of my brain. Some specific notes are kept for long term and re-used, which is seldom - this can (should) moved into a moleskin. Probably I should use the moleskin more? I need a pen or pencil, on paper to plan.
Long Term Storage
I don't use it to think. Mostly digital, Markdown. Stored on my filesystem, Git or IMAP. Avoiding all weird and soon defunct commercial things.
OP's post also references a similar post [0], but I am curious to hear from the people here.
[0] - https://hamatti.org/posts/how-i-take-work-notes-as-a-develop...
Nothing I have tried comes close. No iPad, writing code directly, talking it through, thinking it through, sketching it out on whatever drawing tool you might like. Pencil and paper are all I want.
Now, let's argue about our favourite colours and why teal is objectively the best.
OTOH if the plan is very simple and obvious, and can be drawn out in one go, it doesn't really need a diagram in the first place, so I skip spending time drawing the obvious stuff.
I don't often do very complex software plans like that. My working notes are often on a smaller scale like individual features or so. If we need to document the full architecture for the project, I'm happy to do that with digital tools.
But while I'm planning parts of it or designing it, I do better with pen and paper. My main issue with many of the digital tools I've tried comes down to the added friction if I need to switch to a different tool in the app when I switch between circles and rectangles and text and the fact that I find free-hand drawing with mouse really difficult.
> OTOH if the plan is very simple and obvious, and can be drawn out in one go, it doesn't really need a diagram in the first place, so I skip spending time drawing the obvious stuff.
I think there's a middle ground where it might be easy to draw on one go but deciding what to draw and how things work together and what's needed requires iterations and for that, thinking through drawing and writing helps me a ton.
I never use paper because I'm always moving these bullet points around and inserting stuff between them. Apps are too slow.
I never write down all the information because these notes are enough for me to reload everything. It's pretty easy to see that I didn't write something when there's a gap in my notes. I never wrote it down because I'm going to come up with the same or better solution quickly.
This isn't really helpful for anyone else and doesn't work well with pair programming.
I would like to explore using stuff like Zettlekastan note systems with emacs a bit more for actually holding onto a web of knowledge that I refer to. Though this is a different ends, and so requires a different means.
Before personal computers, I had the same experience at the typewriter. I find it very inhibiting to have a machine staring me in the face, waiting, while I try to be creative.
The author uses pen and paper because when they sit down at a computer they end up shifting to "function mode" where they're implementing rather than designing.
That's it.
The important takeaway is to make sure you don't fall into the trap of implementing when you should be designing. How you maintain that balance is up to you.
Exactly! So happy to read you managed to pick up the core gist of the story.
It's important to find the tools that work best for YOU.
I partially wanted to write this because I've often felt as an outsider in tech teams where everyone sits at a computer 7.5 hours every day and I'm the one thinking better when I'm away from the screen and keyboard. So I wanted to offer an example to those who are like me and also feel like they might not belong.
1). The available screen real estate for doing work is tiny.
2). The tools people use have happy paths that force you to work a specific way.
3). Deep thinking is impossible with interruptions.
As an example of a tool which works best on computers, I've finally recreated the literate environment I used at a previous job on my own time and from scratch: https://olive-alayne-28.tiiny.site/
I can now work happily with Emacs in an environment that supports deep thinking about code instead of fighting with it every step of the way.
If you're interested [1] and [3] from that paper are great introductions to literate programming and noweb + emacs + synctex is by far the most pleasant IDE I've ever used.
I also can't rave enough about how well pen tablets work with xournalpp these days. I can take notes on top of multi-thousand page printouts of code bases and rearrange, doodle, remix, and add new pages wherever I feel like. Even five years ago there was no tool that would let you do that without the threat of a major crash is you wrote too fast.
There’s a good insight in there about preserving your process of arriving at a conclusion, but it’s better done in obsidian or notion or something like that.