Building Your Personal Encyclopedia

How do staff+ engineers always have resources for everything?

Have you ever been in the middle of solving a problem and got a bit of déjà vu? You know that you fixed something similar a while ago but have no idea where that PR is.

You spend 30 minutes digging through Slack, Google Docs, GitHub and can’t find it anywhere. Guess you’ll have to solve it from scratch all over again. 🙂

Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files.

- Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain

This ain’t it! As a software engineer one of your biggest skills needs to be the ability to find relevant resources (ideally, quickly).

These are what I consider the top 3 ways to achieve this skill:

1. Creating a personal encyclopedia

2. Becoming very skilled at filtering (logs, messages, etc)

3. Having a good understanding of your company’s different products

1. Creating a Personal Encyclopedia

Of course it’s important to maintain documentation for your team, but your personal encyclopedia is different. Your personal notes are for you and will be useless to anyone else who finds them.

Here’s a recent example for myself. It’s been a while since I’ve done python or full stack development and I kept forgetting the commands to develop locally.

I added this page to my personal encyclopedia so if I search “local development” I can find these commands easily to copy and paste.

It doesn’t really matter where you keep your notes but it helps to have it somewhere central and searchable. There’s no point of taking these notes if you don’t have a way to find them.

At my previous job I kept all my notes in my Slack DM so that everything was searchable through the Slack UI (my personal notes as well as things across channels).

2. Get Skilled at Advanced Filtering

Getting away with just using quotes around words for exact matches isn’t quite enough. When searching through Slack, docs and especially logging you should be using the advanced search.

Some things to try:

• Narrowing the namespace for logs

• Searching within a time range

• Searching messages from a specific author (e.g. a tech lead you think could’ve mentioned something relevant)

• Filtering by specific customers you know have come across the same issue

• Searching in a specific channel instead of across slack

• etc

I’ve found my most success when I get as specific as possible with my searches.

3. Understand Your Company

The more you have an understanding of your company’s hierarchy, the easier it’ll be to know where to look. Start attending all hands meetings or just get to know tech leads from neighboring organizations. Once you know who is responsible for what, it’ll be easier to know where to look.

For example if you recently familiarized yourself with the search team, the next time you have an issue related to the search service you know which channels to go to or who to page.

Conclusion

There’s no right way to keep track of all this information, but there is a wrong way (trying to keep it all in your head).

Personally I really enjoyed reading Building a Second Brain and would recommend it to anyone who wants to take note taking seriously!

Thanks for reading :)

Eden