How do you take notes while learning to code?
I take notes constantly and reread them approximately never. Markdown files, a notebook, sticky notes, screenshots lost in some folder — it feels productive in the moment and then the information evaporates anyway. I'm starting to suspect the note-taking itself is the procrastination: the feeling of learning without any of the retention. The things that actually stuck are the ones I struggled through and then used, never the ones I copied down neatly. So what's your system — do you take notes at all, or just build things and let repetition do the work? I'd genuinely take one note habit that survives contact with reality.
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AnonymousAnon Honestly, repetition plus building beats notes for me every time. The only notes that survive are "gotchas" — the weird 20-minute bug and its fix. Everything else I can re-derive or search for, so writing it down neatly was mostly busywork dressed up as progress.
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AnonymousAnon I stopped taking notes to remember and started taking them to think. They're a scratchpad I throw away now — the value is in writing it out once, not rereading. The stuff worth keeping I turn into a tiny blog post, because explaining it to an imaginary reader is what actually locks it in.