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Ask HN: How do you track what you learn?

I would like to know your recommendation for a tool to track what you've learned this day/week/month etc.

Some sort of a service where you could easily write notes about the stuff you came accross while developing something.

For instance if I find a very useful link that shows me the correct way to do something, I would like to write that down somewhere with a simple explanation using my own words.

( 9 comments | 7 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by arrmn on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @05:26AM (#11165719)
A few weeks ago there was a post[0][1] on hn from a guy who wrote a daily til for a whole year.

I stole his idea[1] and created jekyll blog on Github, I can just create a new .md file and put the things for the til down. With the new upload feature from github you can also just write the md file locally and just drop it in.

I like it so far, just need to get in the habit of writing it down daily.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11068902 [1] https://github.com/jbranchaud/til [2] http://arminmsg.github.io/blog/til/ http://arminmsg.github.io/blog/til/

Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by hanniabu on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @08:13AM (#11166421)
How do you keep all the markdown files organized and easily searchable? Or do you never reference back to them after you've taken the notes?
Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by jacobsims on Thursday February 25, 2016 @04:19PM (#11177870)
I also started something similar at https://jacobsims.github.io/til/ -- to search them you can just use GitHub search, which is available in that top bar. I also spent a bit more effort creating category pages that look like fancy little tags (due to limits of Jekyll, I can't paginate them, but it will work for a while anyway).
Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by arrmn on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @02:54PM (#11169687)
I do plan to reference back to the notes or else they would be meaningless. My current solution is to add categories to the posts and the use jekyll to generate a page where I create a headline for each category and link to all related posts there. This may not be the final solution, it was thrown together one evening so there's improvement.

I don't know how this will scale since I just started this project.

Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by hanniabu on Thursday February 25, 2016 @02:33PM (#11177110)
Understandable, thanks for the reply
Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by kennyfrc on Friday February 26, 2016 @01:37AM (#11180115)
Apart from keeping track, a related problem I'm facing is making sure that I am able to re-implement what I'm doing.

So what I do is the following:

1. I break down what I've learned into steps or checklists

2. I then put these into Scrivener

3. Each topic that I've learned has it's own page

Here's a small example from my notes around PDF generation + attachments in Rails. This is just the overall picture -- each bullet point expands to another bunch of notes which has actual code details.

* build a mailer with mail(to:, from: content:)

* build a controller what delivers that content

* the controller should render a notice that says that the post has been successfully created <via a respond_to method>

* make sure that you configure the SMTP settings

* build a pdf creator (PrawnPDF::Base) => this initializes a PDF w/ some view_context

* configure a MIME type within config/initializers

* configure a controller that triggers a respond_to for this

* add a button that links to think Printable receipt

* save the PDF into some foldere

* insert a paperclip file type into the migration

* add this intot he user model

* go back to the PDF / order controller and then add a custom path to save the PDF (pdf.render file…)

* then save that file inside teh database & set it to the certificate

Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by hanniabu on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @08:12AM (#11166413)
I usually just keep notes in plain text files and save the likes in an organized bookmark directory of folders so I can easily find relevant links. I do like what the other commenter suggested about the markdown files on github though, but I'm not sure what the best way to navigate those would be.
Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by julio-r on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @03:30PM (#11169995)
I generally use Google Keep that syncs between my devices, but I'm not completely happy with it.
Re:Ask HN: How do you track what you learn? by zwetan on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @12:47AM (#11164798)
personally I use a local wiki to keep notes, links, research etc.

https://github.com/gollum/gollum