Early in my career as a software engineer, my notes wereā¦ chaos.
My Supervisor Said My Notes Were Scattered. She Was Right.
Some were in notebooks.
Some in sticky notes.
Some were screenshots.
Some were in Slack messages.
And honestly a lot of them were inside ChatGPT conversations.
Whenever I solved something during development I would write it down somewhere.
The problem was that āsomewhereā was never the same place.
So when the same problem appeared again, I had to search everywhere.
Or worse, ask my supervisor again.
One day during a discussion my supervisor casually pointed something out.
She said my notes were scattered.
She has more than 20 years of experience as an architect engineer, software engineer and solution analyst. When she said that, I started paying attention to how she works.
Whenever we needed to check something she didnāt search chats or scroll messages.
She simply opened documentation.
FRS
Technical documentation
System notes
Everything was structured and traceable.
Need to check a system flow. Open the document.
Need to confirm a requirement. Open the document.
Need to understand logic. Open the document.
It looked effortless.
And honestly, I was amazed.
After that I started observing how other developers around me keep track of their knowledge.
One of my colleagues showed me something very simple.
Google Keep.
Just clean notes organized by sections. Things like project setup, debugging notes, configuration steps and useful commands. Everything searchable.
That was the moment something clicked for me.
The real problem was not forgetting.
The real problem was not being able to find what I already learned.
So I changed one small habit.
Whenever ChatGPT helps me solve something during development like debugging an error, understanding a framework or fixing configuration I extract the useful parts and save them into my own structured notes.
Now my notes look something like this.
Project Setup
Environment configuration and installation steps
Common Errors
Error message, root cause and solution
Debugging Notes
Things that broke and how I fixed them
Architecture Understanding
Service flow and system logic
Database Notes
Important tables and queries
Useful Commands
Terminal commands and scripts
The difference has been huge.
When I return to a project after a few days or weeks I donāt need to remember everything from scratch. I just search my notes.
It also reduced how often I interrupt my supervisor with questions like āhow did we fix this last timeā.
Something I didnāt expect is that organizing my notes made me feel more like an engineer building knowledge over time instead of someone solving the same problems again and again.
Good developers donāt just write code.
They build systems to remember what they learn.
Sometimes growth starts with a simple comment.
āYour notes are scattered.ā
And that small sentence quietly changed how I work.
Tools and references:
Google Keep
https://keep.google.com
Notion
https://www.notion.so
Obsidian
https://obsidian.md
Functional Requirement Specification explanation
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/functional-requirement-specification/
Software documentation guide
https://www.atlassian.com/work-management/knowledge-sharing/documentation
Iām still improving how I document things.
How do you organize your development knowledge?
Notes app, documentation, personal wiki or something else?
I would love to learn how other developers manage this.
Top comments (2)
This is very helpful!!
hihihihi ur welcome !!