Write it down. Document it. Record it. From my personal experience, it is always better to write things down. This goes for things at home, work, or school. If you have an idea or come up with a solution to a problem, write it down so you don’t have to come up with that idea/solution again a month down the line. It just so happens that one of the patterns in Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman[AP] by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye is about recording information. It is called “Record What You Learn” [AP]. The title of the patter itself explains it all. It discusses how it is very important to record any ideas you have or solutions to problems you have developed [AP]. More importantly, it discusses how these things should not just be written down and forgotten [AP]. I cannot agree more with what this pattern is all about. Your records should become a resource for you to use later on down the line when you are working on something you felt you have seen before and aren’t quite sure what the solution was [AP]. Writing stuff down can save you time and frustration. I have learned this lesson more than once and I’ll probably learn it again a few more times too. I agree with how this pattern stresses why it is important to record thoughts, ideas, solutions, etc. I can’t tell you how many times I have fixed some sort of program or had some sort of idea and said “Oh, I’ll remember how I did that. It was a pretty simple fix” only to run into the same problem 3 months down the line and spend a whole day trying to fix the issue. Had I written it down, it probably would have taken me about 10 minutes to realize I had it written down and another 10 minutes to follow the steps I wrote. The problem is fixed in 20 minutes. Another benefit to recording what you’ve done is it allows you to share it with others [AP]. By doing so, you may be saving someone else tons of time and frustration because they were able to utilize what you shared. The end lesson of all this is simply, write it down. It will make everyone’s lives easier.
Link to pattern in book: https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/apprenticeship-patterns/9780596806842/ch05s06.html
From the blog CS@Worcester – README by Matthew Foley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.