Transitioning to plain text

Transitioning to plain text

(this blog post was authored in Visual Studio Code, using plain text (well, markdown))

I'm an avid note taker, having used my fair share of both Evernote and OneNote. After listening to the Managing Humans audiobook (Michael Lopp), however, I've given a try to taking plain text notes, reducing formatting to a minimum.

What I've found, is that plain text offers great ease - there's a lot less to think about / consider! Together with frequent commits to a (local) git repo, I've have a wonderful experience, which I want to share with you.

How to

  1. Dedicate a directory for your notes (e.g. C:\src\tech-lead)

  2. Initialize a git repository (e.g. cd C:\src && mkdir tech-lead && cd tech-lead && git init && echo "# Exclude" > .gitignore && git add .gitignore && git commit -m "My notes")

  3. Pat yourself on your back - you're done!

Ongoing considerations

  • Refrain from saving everything. You now have source control. Delete previous comments/notes and commit your new changes. When (IF) you need them again, they're right there, stored away safely.

  • Whenever you get a new idea / topic / thought, create a new named file with the content.

  • As soon as you've finished editing a file (your meeting / catch-up is over, or there's a natural pause in your thinking), stage and commit your changes with a comment describing what you've done. This is super easy using Visual Studio Code: Just naviate to the Source Control panel (CTRL-SHIFT-G G), jot down a comment and hit CTRL-ENTER (if you have edited only one file (which, most of the time, you should have)).

Finding stuff

Referring to my 1st point above on not saving everything: As your note taking system is now backed by source control, you can rely on git (and compatible tooling!) to find stuff.

Let's start with finding recent edits (aka what did I do last week?):

git log --decorate=short --since=last_week --sparse --oneline --name-only

Example output:

6926f3d (HEAD -> master) Atlassian model, Generic PaaS, Customer experience
Random thoughts.md
3f4ed77 Catch-up 07/06/2022
Ian.md
407b064 Catch-up 07/06/2022
Beca.md
a324e84 git log details
Transitioning to plain text.md
ce79fff markdownlint
Jose.md
07aa1ad Jose 06/06/2022
Jose.md
ed5b740 Weekend
Weekend.md
a48a4c8 Achievements

I mentioned tooling. As git is so standardized and adopted in our industry, you're bound to find a tool that you like to handle any history traversal. Circling back to Visual Studio Code again, its GitLens extension lets you view Commits as an accordion in the Source Control view, saving you from remembering/aliasing the above command.

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