As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

I wonder how many developers today were forced to take an introductory drafting class. I know a lot of us played with Lego. The problem of describing a 3 dimensional object in two dimensions requires extra projections to describe the thing. A 3d object in 2 dimensions takes three drawings to mostly describe. If the object is more complex than three dimensions, you need to look at it from a lot more angles.

The book Smarter Faster Better introduced me to the concept of disfluency - the idea that extra friction such as awkward fonts, new environments, different tools, etc will pull you out of autopilot mode and force you to think in new ways. I haven’t seen references to it elsewhere, but it’s changed how I approach problems and learning the last 9 years. Switching to a notebook is one great way I use to trigger this as well.

This is one of the reasons that I actually take notes in three different media: paper notebooks, an old-school digital voice recorder, and in text files. Different media have different advantages and disadvantages and represent different ideas for more readily.

I have used the voice recorder less over the years but I find it optimal when time is limited and I have to move onto something else. Part of using a voice recorder as a medium is listening closely afterwards and writing down what I said in a different manner (either in a more permanent paper notebook or digitally in a text file). And yes, each iteration transforms the idea at least somewhat. It gives you the chance to see the idea in a different way.

I read a study a while back that said context switching costs ~15 minutes on average. I don't know how true it is, but my bosses have always believed it and tried to respect it.

This is why (apart from being Irish) I drink a fair bit of tea throughout the day.

Going to the kitchen, boiling water and letting it brew, gets me away from my desk and gives me an opportunity to start thinking out loud while I wait.

Sometimes just getting up out of my chair will shake loose some tough problem and the answer will be clear.

Alas, even after all these years, I occasionally grind away on things rather than remembering this.

Something I noticed for myself—doing a live webinar series over a couple days and taking notes with pen/paper in realtime—I really struggled to keep up at first, but over a few days I started to notice my ability to do a listen-and-write context shift improved and it felt like I was able to retain auditory information better.

This is a great insight. I have no data to back it up by my experience is very similar

Out of curiosity, what kind of writing? Journaling and getting your thoughts out, or fiction, something else?

The sciencey side of this is that writing stuff down boosts memory, retention and learning, even if you immediately throw away what you wrote.

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.

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 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.

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.

Most of the contents of my notebook are never looked at again, just lists of thoughts, order of events, etc.

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'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'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.

>>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.

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.

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.

This feels like saying "when building a house, obviously a hammer is more important than the blueprints. This isn't art class, it's construction"

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.

> “craftsmanship cosplay”

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.

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.

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.

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).

OP here.

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.

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.

I have a 24 inch pen display.

The last time I worked as a CTO I bought them for the whole team. Being able to redraw things on a shared digital white board beats having to redraw the same 4 boxes a dozen times because you keep running out of space.

Also saves people taking photos of the white board before erasing.

Whiteboard (blackboard etc.) is life.

I use excalidraw for this and think it’s better than whiteboard because

1) it’s prettier and less messy 2) the digital markers are never dry 3) it encourages more edits and changes

I basically start all my technical designs in excalidraw now

From a quick search:

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.

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.

Each to their own.

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.

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 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.

OP here.

> 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.

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.

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.

Sorry, that's not allowed.

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.

> None of it is saved.

As we're absorbing this idea... I've seen employment contracts for technical people that arguably might consider these handwritten notes to be IP artifacts, which must be preserved and made accessible to the company.

If that's your situation, you could scribble the date, your name, project, etc. in some margin of the piece of paper, and stick it in a pile/folder. To eventually be scanned, and the file put somewhere accessible, and/or the paper technically preserved.

In a startup, you might also want to preserve things like these for nostalgia, even if they have no IP value. One seed startup, I kept a folder of "nostalgia" photos, video clips, screenshots, etc., of early prototypes, people working late, incremental successes, etc., and it was quickly a good thing. It's amazing how well you can progress, and what positive feelings you have some of these things that quickly become nostalgic. Anyone can see the current state of the code in the repo, but here's the pencil sketch on quadrille paper (or a napkin) one evening that became our architecture.

wow, what a website. got totally immersed in your backstory. last time i had such fun was with https://meyerweb.com/