Monday, February 9, 2026
One of my core software engineering practices is writing, by hand, in a physical notebook . It's one of the most important things I do to remain productive and effective. Maybe the single most important. And it's a practice that I see very few others using!
When I polled my Mastodon followers, 25% of them said they use an engineering notebook, 40% said they don't, and 34% didn't know what one is! In two other programming communities I'm in, there were really similar results. This practice is really not very widespread, and since a lot of people aren't familiar with it, it's not only a matter of it working for some people but not others. (Though that's certainly a factor!)
What's an engineering notebook?
First off, though, what am I talking about? I'm not talking about a specific kind of paper notebook. And I'm not talking about Jupyter notebooks. I'm talking about a practice of recording notes as you work on things, documenting what you're doing and why. This has long been a practice for researchers, keeping lab notebooks.
There are a lot of different practices, but there are some common characteristics between them:
They're very detailed. Each thing you're working on is recorded. Your hypothesis or goal is recorded. It's detailed enough that someone else could come along and replicate the steps.
They are dated. Each entry is provided with a date, so you can trace back when things happened.
They're done in real-time. Rather than recording information after a project is finished, notes are written as it progresses.
They create permanent records. Notes are written without erasing old notes, going forward in an append-only fashion. No pages are removed or modified.
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