Effective note taking for developers

Suriya Ganesh — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 11:50:26 +0000

Note Taking

One of the most underrated skills in programming is note taking mastering this one skill will make you a better engineer and help save you a lot of time which you can then reutilize it for learning more skills. This article will try to capture the essence of effective note taking from a Developer perspective.

Why to take notes

while many developers are plagued with this question why note taking is relevant especially in this chatGPT era where you have both the powerful LLMS and the more traditional tools like Google search and Stack Overflow at your disposal to answer this I will clarify as to what do I mean by note taking in this context, in this article I am referring to make notes of contextual flow of code and note just copy pasting commands and code, and more over note taking also involves maintaining a repository of the issues which you have encountered and documenting them so that you can refer them later instead of reinventing the wheel.

How to take notes

when it comes to this there are many tools out there like Onenote, Notion, Evernote, Obsidian and so on, though I personally prefer Onenote due to its comparatively easier UI to navigate, quick search and simple notes section, all the note taking Apps work more or less the same so the focus should be more on the content rethaer than on the app which is used.

So lets dive deeper into how to effectively take notes for technical use cases, your notes should contain the following information:

what topic is it about
what is the issue you have faced
what is the solution you have done to resolve the same

Logging your work

while note taking generally refers to the technical documentation it can also server a double purpose of logging your work which you can later use like your professional diary to get a list of your accomplishments later during the appraisal season. You can simply revisit the tickets you have worked and spin a good story on top of it as to how it has helped the team, organization this will help catapult your career.

Do share your thoughts in comments as what are your favorite tools/methods for note taking and how it has impacted your career.

The programming language conundrum

Suriya Ganesh — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 12:09:16 +0000

As a programmer, the scenario that all of us have at least faced once in our life what programming language to learn first(for newbies) or what language to learn next for experienced engineers. This article tries to provide with you a better understanding to do the same.

Python: The second best Language to do anything
If you are a newbie who is trying to learn programming then one of the best choice would be to go with python simply because of its simplicity and versatility.

In case of an experienced engineer you can never go wrong by learning python and adding it to your skillset because it opens so much opportunities for you in multiple domains due to the versatility, python is simply the second best programming language to do anything and everything across different domain like machine learning to backend web development and scripting.

Python is also backed by a huge community base which is very active and also the simplicity of the language which reads like English always helps programmers to solidify the programming concepts which can then be translated into more complex programming languages.

Python is the "most powerful language you can still read".
― Paul Dubois

JavaScript: The Language for web Development
If you are a newbie it serves you best to have this language in your arsenal especially because due to its dominance in web development also since it is a interpreted language it is easy to pick up for people who are new to programming.

For Experienced Developers, working with Javascript opens up many doors as the language which was primarily used in Frontend Development in the past, it has started to branch out into other areas like backend development(node.js) and machine learning(Tensorflow).

The Language itself is simple, dynamic and easy to learn and also the plethora of libraries which are built on top of it makes the language even more richer.

Fortunately, JavaScript has some extraordinarily good parts. In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders.”
― Douglas Crockford

Go : King of Concurrency
Even as a newbie, while it is easier to start with a simple interpreted language like python and javascript it always helps to learn a compiled language which puts a lot of emphasis on type safety, Compiled Languages gives you a lot of perspective and opens you up to possibilities.

If you are an experienced Developer there are two scenarios in which learning GO would be extremely beneficial to you:

If you are into DevOps/Cloud native Development, because most of the common DevOps tools like Docker, Kubernetes themselves are written in GO.
Backend Developer , because Go is written by Google engineers keeping in mind the microservices and cloud based architecture which are more prevalent now and also the concurrency which has been made easier with GO.

In real world there are some applications which needs to be written keeping in mind the high amount of data that needs to be processed in these scenarios GO makes a very good case for itself as it is Extremely quick being a compiled Language and also effectively making use of CPU resources by enabling Concurrency.