Keeping a plaintext “did” file
Similar but not the same: most days day at work I create one or more txt files in notepad (kate to be exact) where I paste every temporary info while I work on some task. Basically everything that doesn't go to git, and you have to keep somewhere while you're working on it:<p>- nonobvious terminal commands or small scripts I had to write<p>- fixes for enviromental/configuration problems<p>- fragments of stacktraces<p>- fragments of log files<p>- packages that needed to be installed<p>- short todo lists I created while doing sth<p>- links to webpages I found that had a solution to my problem<p>- profiling results for solutions I compared<p>- parts of emails I copied to focus on the important fragments with stuff to check/fix<p>- names of temporary branches created when working on the problem<p>- xml fragments from some requests I copypasted to kate to prettify it<p>There's no structure and no plain English descriptions in these files, just bunch of copypasted stuff separated by a few empty lines in a text file.<p>I have to keep these things somewhere anyway while I work on them, and pasting them in one file that I later save in one directory preserves them for future. I call the file yyyymmdd_some_keywords.txt.<p>I don't bother to describe the task in plain English, the stuff that's copypasted there is enough for context, I can also check git from same date if something's not clear. The most important thing is - there's no overhead, just open the file when starting a new task, keep it opened while you work on sth and save it when you finish. So I have hundreds of these files after a while, and when I encounter some problem I can quickly grep to check if I seen similar stacktrace before and what it was about.<p>Before I started doing this I had several instances of déjà vu - I could swear I've seen this problem before but can't remember what it was about and how it was solved.