Do you ever use Markdown?
In the past 2.5 years since I’ve been doing development work at Tribune, I keep a running log/diary/scratchpad of the progress and my thought process. I was keeping that as a doc in Google Drive.
Now I’m writing it as plain text in Markdown format, so the log/diary/scratchpad is lighter. One of my development scratchpads is something like 400 pages long as a Google Doc. It takes a while to even just load up.
Yes. Four hundred pages. I keep everything. I literally think through how to do things. Think and type. It’s a good process for me, because i’m pretty much the only developer in our group, so I don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of. I bounce my ideas into a text format. and it helps me think.
Plus, then i have an archive of how I solved problems. I capture all the URLs of where I found solutions (and which URLs didn’t give me solutions). I also archive the webpages of those URLs are saved in my Evernote, because, as we know, webpages do not live forever).