Keeping Your Own Tech Notes
So I have changed jobs a couple times and one thing that I have found is I miss what documentation I have typed up or used. This time when I moved I was smart enough to take my notes with me. You can find them in my personal blog where I am posting about Postman and Rest-assured.
The thing is I am not much of a note taker and for me I normally memorize and go. What happens when you need to reference something you know weeks or months later however? What if someone else needs information on how you do something? What can you do to not loose your own knowledge when moving job to job?
The answer is to take notes with you and create your own form of documentation. I am not a note taker so I am going to have to train myself to do this. I have created and left so much documentation over the years and because of that I have forgotten so much. I have decided I need a second brain to keep this info, or that is what the YouTubers who talk about this subject call it. You will see my blog some of my notes that I am working on keeping as a way to keep them.
The two main options out there are Notion and Obsidian. Of course there is Google Docs, Word, and so many more. You need to find what works for you. I personally thought Notion to be too much and I have used Google docs before but I wanted something that supported Markdown as I use that when I create my notes in GitHub, GitLab, or Confluence. So I wanted my notes to be easily transferable. Also I wanted it to sync between my computers and ipad. I ended up paying for Obsidian sync but you could sync between your computers using Git and a Github repo. Whatever works for you I think taking notes in my career is vitally important.
My wife who is not in IT but in Marketing Automation keeps copies of her documentation to take with her and has for years. You don't want to leave part of your brain behind when switching jobs. You also don't want to have to relearn something when you could just have had good notes to go back to. I have recently spent time going over Java and GitLab. I know both but I am very rusty and need to refresh my memory. If I would have taken good notes I would not need to. I also have lost information on how I created some of my GitHubs because I don't remember how I worked with Circle CI and GitHub Actions.
I have learned Docker on 2 separate occasions so don't be like me, keep notes. Find your second brain and take it with you. If you write documentation for work take it with you. If you have created a framework before, take a git of your framework... not your code cause that is owned by your work but the framework or architecture of your repo.
