How I Take (and Organise) My Notes As a Software Engineer

Taking notes is incredibly important to help you remember what you are learning. In this video, I cover how I take notes and organise them, so I can find everything when I need them.
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💬 Mentioned in this video:
Moleskin Notebook: geni.us/hfGaxG
Leuchtturm 1917 Notebook: geni.us/6mnacS
Building A Second Brain - geni.us/Vag0b
Building A Second Brain Summary - www.alexhyett.com/book-notes/...
How to Take Smart Notes - geni.us/c8yftCf
Notion - www.notion.so/
Obsidian - obsidian.md/
Matter - hq.getmatter.app
Readwise - readwise.io
📝 Blog Post: www.alexhyett.com/how-to-take...
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The Complete Junior to Senior Web Developer Roadmap - academy.zerotomastery.io/a/af...
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📚 RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Clean Code - geni.us/5AEwj2
Clean Architecture - geni.us/yBrTX
Domain Driven Design - geni.us/WiR0Q0x
Design Patterns - geni.us/5ncUt
Developer Hegemony - geni.us/lAXy
Pragmatic Programmer - geni.us/GfNj9
Data Structures and Algorithms Made Easy - geni.us/sqg6kJ
Refactoring - geni.us/ufAP0mE
The Productive Programmer - geni.us/IT9WiN
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning - geni.us/x81A
Test Driven Development - geni.us/HFV52
Microservices - geni.us/8vMA
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Visual Studio Code - code.visualstudio.com/
Obsidian - obsidian.md/
Notion - affiliate.notion.so/alexhyett
⏳ TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Introduction
00:22 Going fully digital
00:40 Notebook and pens
01:37 Notion
03:04 Obsidian
03:58 Building a Second Brain
04:34 Note folder structure
06:37 Matter
07:06 Readwise
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🧑‍💻WHO AM I
I'm Alex, a Software Developer and KZbin working in the UK. I make videos about software development to help developers with the skills they need to be senior developers. As well as this KZbin Channel, I also write articles on my website (alexhyett.com) as well as write a regular newsletter that contains some thoughts to help aspiring developers.
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#coding #programming #notes

[@alexhyettdev]

After recording this video the new Reader app by Readwise came out. It is very polished and worth a try.

[@SteparuBR]

Thank you for the video!

[@randymartin9040]

What an incredible video, that was so spot on for what I as looking for, thank you, truly!

[@theosu5400]

Just stopping by to thank u for the video and the clarity of the explanation, most content creators make such big videos talking about productivity and spend a lot more time talking about other things without getting to the point haha, so as a person who doesn't have time, I really appreciate it!

[@alexhyettdev]

Thank you I appreciate that!

[@laurenrobinson6427]

Wicked video and resources, thank you - this has been super helpful. I have copious amounts of web bookmarks, notebooks, sheets of paper, word docs, etc., I'm excited to try these tools out.

[@alexhyettdev]

Thank you, I am glad you liked it!

[@Steven-id9mc]

Just finished my first year as a full time SE and can tell you that you will get your ass chewed tf out if you don't take detailed notes. The soft skill that nobody teaches you in school

[@alexhyettdev]

Yes it is so important! Especially when you start out as there will be a lot of domain knowledge that likely isn’t documented very well!

[@Steven-id9mc]

@@alexhyettdev This is just fax. A lot of our documentation is old and outdated. It's full of deprecated tables, deprecated Stored Procedures, or only half of the functions that are currently used within a SP. So I spend a ton of time searching for wtf is @Function = 5, the documentation only goes to 3

[@randymartin9040]

Hey Alex, I'd like to discuss a few topics with regarding what you were writing at :37 . It's interesting that you have some fib stuff in there, when that's a large part of my interest that I'm already 5 years past, but likely for different reasons than you, I'd like to discuss the overlaps between our knowledge and see if we can fuel each other with some prior knowledge the other didn't have. Let me know if interested (I also like software dev, and I say dev because I never took the more extreme engineering courses related to computer scienece).

[@Slaughter327]

Where/How did you get the icons you use for your folders?

[@alexhyettdev]

If you search in the community plugins for Icon Folder you can then add icons from FontAwesome and other Icon packs to your folders.

[@EnternodeCS]

I remember always failing to move notes from paper to digital; I think there's two reasons for this. One, I organize my notes cronologically sorted by category. What I write down is usually an outline of important concepts from a book, lectures, or other start to finish material that has meaning when ordered this way. But even in other scenarios, my mind seems to be able to remember when I learned something fairly well. Two, I think there is a sort of impact on how well I remember something without having to refer back to my notes if I have written it down. I think this is because in the process of taking my notes, I fully digest the material and then condense it down to key concepts that are much more memerable. But I haven't taken notes in a few years now... and I think I should get back to doing that.

[@alexhyettdev]

Yes taking notes definitely helps me remember the content better. I find having digital notes really useful when I want to write something from them though as I can search keywords and find information I am looking for.

[@mastersky4316]

You see this comment, when the video already reached 1M. Know, i was here on 500 hundreds.

[@alexhyettdev]

🤞🏻for 1M views. Thank you for supporting my small channel!

[@alexhyettdev]

1K views only 990,000 to go!

[@goudartsilva8086]

notion is traaaaaaaaaaaaaahsssssss

[@alexhyettdev]

I much prefer Obsidian. I mainly use Notion when I need API integration.