As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a notebook

I have used the voice recorder less over the years but I find it optimal when time is limited and I have to move onto something else. Part of using a voice recorder as a medium is listening closely afterwards and writing down what I said in a different manner (either in a more permanent paper notebook or digitally in a text file). And yes, each iteration transforms the idea at least somewhat. It gives you the chance to see the idea in a different way.

Going to the kitchen, boiling water and letting it brew, gets me away from my desk and gives me an opportunity to start thinking out loud while I wait.

Sometimes just getting up out of my chair will shake loose some tough problem and the answer will be clear.

Alas, even after all these years, I occasionally grind away on things rather than remembering this.

Here's one of the hundreds of articles about this, it's a very well documented phenomenon https://www.newscientist.com/article/2414241-writing-things-...

Writing by hand also has a greater effect than typing because it engages more of the senses and more of the brain, in particular the motor cortex.

I keep telling myself that this would all make a great excuse to get a Moleskine, but handwriting just isn't a part of my workflow. Typing copious amounts of stuff into text buffers and then transforming it is, especially now that we have LLMs. If my brain is totally non-functional I simply start typing barely intelligible phrases into a text editor until it wakes up, then I go back and edit/refactor/clean up, and frequently something comes out of this that looks like a vague outline of an email or piece of code I need to write that day. Or at least a todo list. Then we're off to the races doing actual work. Most of the initial doodling is destroyed.

Handwriting does aid retention though.

I periodically review the notes and summarize anything worth keeping into the appropriate system of record (calendar, tickets, wiki, spaced repetition, doesn't matter). Like you, I find that very little is actually worth keeping. And that's fine; the paper notes are not a system of record but more of an extension of working memory.

Same, but I still keep them (both notebooks and random pieces of paper). I find it extremely satisfying to just look into them after many years. It's like looking at random old photos, photos of my thinking process from the past.

Occasionally i'll write something down that I know I'll forget for later reference and put a small post-it sticking out for easy access.

My point is that I'd view this behavior more as a consequence of the circumstances many scientists find themselves in rather than a conscious choice, though I do admit that some people may like it more than I do.

I personally find paper&pen both comforting and unsettling at the same time. Soothing because writing really helps sort out thoughts etc. Mindflow is different from flow "on the computer/phone/tablet".

On the other hand, it's distracting because without an index system (I start each notebook with two blank pages trying to index the contents; every other page has a number) it's easy to get lost.

But today's kids, being digital natives, may take a different approach. Paper&pen may present anxiety for them. So it very much depends on the family we grew up in.

I am thinking about trying to do something with this like scanning for connections between notes or adding some tags to make ideas easier to find.

That's the most important takeaway from using pen(cil) and paper. If you can make it reusable for you great but the most important thing is physically writing it down.

I rarely, if ever, keep anything I have written down in the notebook. Eventually, I rip it out and shred it.

Donald Knuth works that way. In fact, most such people tend to do most of their thinking on paper, making small changes to the problem state, verifying if it sticks, and is going where they want it going. Rollback, make a different change to the same thing, or same change to different things. This goes on over hundreds of pages.

One of the advanced user level performers don't tend to view stationary(especially paper) as something that must be rationed or spent with limits.

The tools you shared are of course important and I enjoy having them a lot. Wouldn't want to work as a developer without version control or debuggers, for sure. Those are tools that if I lost them, it surely would slow me down and be annoying.

I do truly consider notebook more important to me than those. Writing and running code is the tool to get things done but software development to me is more importantly building something valuable that solves problems or makes life easier. And to that, code is often somewhat trivial implementation detail — it's much more important to figure out what to build and how.

Some people are good at thinking when they are in a code editor or other digital tools. My brain goes into detail implementation mode and it's hard for me to see the big picture when I'm writing in code editor and building functionality.

For me, it's crucial part of my job to take my notebook and use it as a tool for thinking before (and during!) coding. While losing access to the other tools would definitely slow me down, not being able to think through writing with pen and paper would cripple my thinking, my problem solving ability, my creativity and thus cause me writing bad software.

The difference between the blue collar machinist and the white collar engineer is exactly this view of the machines they use.

For an engineer a machine - be in a slide rule, calculator or super computer - is just a tool. You're not doing engineering because you're using the tool. You're doing engineering because you're thinking and the tool helps you think a bit faster.

For a machinist the machine is the job. You can't make widgets if you don't have a machine to make them on. Thinking about widgets is pointless because they don't get made by thinking.

I love "This isn't craftsmanship cosplay, it's software engineering.". I will definitely steal this, let me put it in my notebook.

Nice slap down.

Aaaa. I’d like to see stats over the comments—if management role, job history, age, income, education—and I’d expect opinions would be revealed as archetypical. In other words, it says more about the speaker than it says about successful software development.

Clearly the OP is talking about what works for them mentally—focus, creativity.

It’s a mistake for anyone to read a post like this and think of it (and the criticism) as prescriptive. Emulating any of the patterns would have the same result of cargo cult behavior.

But the sentiment holds true. When you're building software designing good code is the most fundamentally important aspect of your job. All the tools you mention are things that enable you to delivery that code, but if the design of the code itself is wrong then they mean very little. The process of designing code feels like a lost art these days; developers are far too happy to throw crap at a wall until enough of it sticks to pass the acceptance criteria. Going back to actually working out the logic and flow of the code (on paper, in a diagramming app, whatever) is missing for a vast amount of the dev community.

If people were happy to work through the logic of a feature before hitting their IDE and debugging the first thing they code up, maybe apps would be a bit less buggy.

Has a notebook or a whiteboard been handy at times? Of course. But the rubber meets the road behind the IDE, and the tooling there is the story of the day.

The new stuff is often fast and many jobs need it by way of keeping up with the standard practices and creating a hiring filter, but it's a supplement, not a foundational tool for thought. It can't be all that important because it's constantly shifting.

For people with higher confidence, those of us who have been around the block a few times, the article is correct. The supporting tools you mention are beneficial, but they aren’t the most important tool. The most important tool is soft skills and taking notes.

I iterate faster, have more freedom and information is displayed and manipulated in a more ergonomic way to me on a computer, in such a way that it creates a symbiotic relationship. I severely doubt physical notetaking and brainstorming could ever compare

Some of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s even used to "program" by handwriting code on paper as kind of a rough draft.

I did this particularly for systems I didn't have at home, like the Apple ][. I'd handwrite programs at home, then take it to school and type it into an Apple ][. This was somewhat common.

I'm personally not a fan of pen and paper, I find it to not scale, I often change devices or I'm on the move, so I rely mostly on note apps (mostly Notion).

I agree with parent comment of notebook and pen being pure romanticism. I mean, heck, I'd rate Obsidian or some other back linking note software as more important than a notebook and pen. A sticky note and pen would be even more important than a notebook and pen.

For at least some people, stepping away from the keyboard may be the best way to do that thinking.

To put it in your own style: This isn't typing class, it's software engineering.

(Maybe it’s different in modern college classes now but wasn’t for decades.)

Exactly! So happy to read you managed to pick up the core gist of the story.

It's important to find the tools that work best for YOU.

I partially wanted to write this because I've often felt as an outsider in tech teams where everyone sits at a computer 7.5 hours every day and I'm the one thinking better when I'm away from the screen and keyboard. So I wanted to offer an example to those who are like me and also feel like they might not belong.

... then like magic, the code comes naturally (I'm guessing that's how normal people think when programming)!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/11/23/why-writing-by-hand-is...

Writing by hand definitely is better for a squirrel brain like me. And searching is overrated, most note-taking is write-only and tends to accumulate without anyone ever reading it back. So optimize for memory retention so you can later form better mental associations with the material, rather than how searchable on a computer it is. Notes on a PC are inert, what you want is to integrate their contents into your brain so you can actually do something with it.

That notebook is the fastest most accessible tool to capture my thoughts. I can state concisely what was discussed in a team meeting last october before any notetaking tool boots up. I know kids names, birthdays and favorite movies of almost all my coworkers which I can glance without switching windows while sharing my screen.

the impossibility of such content being legible to anyone else and being shared is a feature I value very highly.

i take it where i want, introspect, take notes. No screen. No distractions. I doodle, draw lines, write jokes, whatever.

Pages on the right are work things. On the left are my ideas. Index on the first page tells me exactly where to turn to for that idea and mockups i had on filling tedious forms.

I know when I'm spinning my wheels. I can see the gaps in my thinking from months ago. I can see patterns in human behavior that I would otherwise have not noticed.

The simplicity is a huge advantage. I stopped looking for anything better. I don't try to promote it either (except on rare occasions). Saved me hours.

I wholeheartedly agree with the author. I find it really hard to think deeply at a computer. Too many distractions.

The speed of writing and search isn't a problem for me. With the writing, I wish I could write faster, but deep thinking isn't fast anyway.

Search, well, 99% of what I write is never looked at again. It's all a process of working things out, committing stuff to memory.

Whenever I'm stuck, stepping away from the computer is usually the best way forward.

It's remarkable how much of the lecture you'll remember. And when you read your handwritten notes, you'll remember the lecture that went with it.

It is absolutely the wrong tool for any long-term information store. Ephemeral think-it-through process notes only. Obsidian for anything that should live longer than the current problem I’m trying to solve.

> It's slow to write

Only to an extent. I write fast enough with pen and paper that my thinking is the bottleneck — which isn't really that fast. I don't need to write down everything I think so it also acts as a filter and processor of those thoughts.

> insanely slow to search what you've written

Compared to digital notes system, sure. But the way I use my notes, I don't usually need a full-text search to find stuff. I remember what I've been working on, I often browse through my notebooks to revisit ideas and most often these notebook notes are kind of a "working copy" where the search relevance is often just for the feature so it only needs to be fast to search for a few days or weeks.

I also do copy many of my notes down in digital format too when there's something worth capturing for long term storage for the sake of searching for example.

> almost impossible to copy or share

100%. Sharing is not a consideration for me, these are my raw pure thoughts and explorations, they don't often make much sense to other people as-is. Sometimes I may take a photo of a UI sketch or something to share if needed but otherwise when I have something to share, I write it based on my notes rather than sharing my notes as they are.

I use an automatic scanner to store the important papers as documentation. Now you can even send those to gemini or google cloud to digitalise it for cheap.

At any given time I have four sheets of paper over my desk that I can see in parallel, but I could have 8 or 10 for complex problems with areas equivalent to engineering or architectural blueprints.

Having said that, I can draw and paint very well as I was interested since childhood and had formal training. Probably is not for everyone, but it is for me.

To me, none of the qualities you listed matter when it comes to sketching ideas, thinking about problems, staying on track while problem solving. When I'm done with the task, I read through my notes once and throw it out.

Also: I just like writing.

that's probably the most important thing. it forces you to slow down and think it through and actually absorb it.

Searching what I have written in the past would be useless for me because it wouldn't necessarily make sense. It's more about the physically writing it out.

If you need to draw approximate diagrams, or formulae, or flows, or trees, or whatever else, instead...

The last time I worked as a CTO I bought them for the whole team. Being able to redraw things on a shared digital white board beats having to redraw the same 4 boxes a dozen times because you keep running out of space.

Also saves people taking photos of the white board before erasing.

1) it’s prettier and less messy 2) the digital markers are never dry 3) it encourages more edits and changes

I basically start all my technical designs in excalidraw now

You must choose one side or the other, and fully commit to it (like everyone else in this comment section). But it's too late now, since you've already tried both sides (fully digital and fully notebook) with an open mind, that means your opinion is automatically invalid and wrong.

Them's the rules.

As we're absorbing this idea... I've seen employment contracts for technical people that arguably might consider these handwritten notes to be IP artifacts, which must be preserved and made accessible to the company.

If that's your situation, you could scribble the date, your name, project, etc. in some margin of the piece of paper, and stick it in a pile/folder. To eventually be scanned, and the file put somewhere accessible, and/or the paper technically preserved.

In a startup, you might also want to preserve things like these for nostalgia, even if they have no IP value. One seed startup, I kept a folder of "nostalgia" photos, video clips, screenshots, etc., of early prototypes, people working late, incremental successes, etc., and it was quickly a good thing. It's amazing how well you can progress, and what positive feelings you have some of these things that quickly become nostalgic. Anyone can see the current state of the code in the repo, but here's the pencil sketch on quadrille paper (or a napkin) one evening that became our architecture.

Can you elaborate? Do you have any examples of such interactions with LLMs?

But as soon as I turn from implementing and debugging code to conceptual thinking or building a mental mode of a problem domain, LLMs currently function for me mainly as Grammarly on steroids. There’s no one tool in this space that’s supreme - Zotero, DuckDuckGo, Google Scholar, pen and paper, draw.io, and Google Docs all play a role. I’m a PhD student, YMMV, the LLMs do improve over time, etc.

I don't often do very complex software plans like that. My working notes are often on a smaller scale like individual features or so. If we need to document the full architecture for the project, I'm happy to do that with digital tools.

But while I'm planning parts of it or designing it, I do better with pen and paper. My main issue with many of the digital tools I've tried comes down to the added friction if I need to switch to a different tool in the app when I switch between circles and rectangles and text and the fact that I find free-hand drawing with mouse really difficult.

> OTOH if the plan is very simple and obvious, and can be drawn out in one go, it doesn't really need a diagram in the first place, so I skip spending time drawing the obvious stuff.

I think there's a middle ground where it might be easy to draw on one go but deciding what to draw and how things work together and what's needed requires iterations and for that, thinking through drawing and writing helps me a ton.

I never use paper because I'm always moving these bullet points around and inserting stuff between them. Apps are too slow.

I never write down all the information because these notes are enough for me to reload everything. It's pretty easy to see that I didn't write something when there's a gap in my notes. I never wrote it down because I'm going to come up with the same or better solution quickly.

This isn't really helpful for anyone else and doesn't work well with pair programming.

Most notably - https://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-hand...

Discussed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791049

Also love writing things on paper. I love using different pens, and write in different styles sometimes (cursive, block, normal, whatever). I just take quick throwaway notes on paper or I'll sometimes sit down and outline things for an hour over a few sheets just to put organization to some large task which I'll translate into something for consumption by others later. Almost always throw these away. Sometimes I work through a notepad, sometimes it's a little notebook, sometimes it's printer paper... getting away from the screen for a bit is lovely.

And I set up a notes section on my computer which I can pop open with a quick <space>X in ViM which has a directory structure giving me spaces for recurring meetings, architecture work, or notes on whatever initiatives I'm trying to push through. I index file names with 01-, 02- etc and if I have a section that branches out I'll just add another index so 01A-, 01B-, etc...

Having everything in ViM with a tmux conf setup that scaffolds out a ton of different spaces I've set up mnemonic keyboard shortcuts to navigate to is really helpful in reducing the overload of having Slack, IDEs, browsers, notepads, music, etc etc etc all open at once (since on a good day I just have Slack, Outlook, iTerm, Firefox and maybe Figma or Music open at most points). I'm also quick to wipe away tabs in the browser...

Next up I'm diving into Figma so I can turn these ideas into beautiful diagrams and even mock interfaces my partners can ingest visually for easier understanding of complex spaces

Finally, and I'm thankful I can afford to do this, but I turn all notification sounds off, Slack'll bounce once from the hidden dock...

It's great, distraction free, tailored to my needs, a fair amount of variety, and some really nice productive times.