Something I’ve learned at my current job is just how valuable it is to take notes and book keep what you do. Not only is note taking helpful for documenting how to go about using a technology, or solve a problem, it also allows you to clearly express your achievements to your boss.
Maybe this section would be useful for briefly going over a couple tools that I’ve used with regards to note taking. The first tool I used was OneNote. The nice thing about OneNote is that you can sync it to a cloud service and collaborate on notes with other people. This has been useful in the past for tracking meetings or document actions that people need to follow up on and have a single source that tells everyone that. The next app that I tried out and quite liked was Obsidian. This is a markdown based note taking app that has a lot of neat community plugins like kanban boards and calendars. This is also the first app that introduced me to the concept of backlinking notes. In doing so you can create these maps like the following picture below.
Currently, I am using dendron which is an extension on VSCode. So far I’m really liking dendron. Since I usually have VSCode open anyway, the fact that it’s in a similar app is a big plus. It is also has backlinking and map diagrams of your notes together. Additionally there are some nice features that are inherited with VSCode just since it is within the app. While these are just a few nice apps to get started, the meat of this blog is the importance of notes.
I forget things constantly. I find it frustrating when you think you remember how to navigate a tool or how to go about writing certain pieces of code. A good rule of thumb that my coworker ingrained in me is that if you end up doing something more than once, it’s worth noting down what you did and how you go about doing it. I work with SQL a lot and work, and every now I will get asked to do something that I’ve sort of done before but just slightly different. I have a SQL Scripts folder where I dump all the code I write for SQL (similarly for Python or any other language you end up writing in). In this folder, I then label my files like update_Table or sp_CoolStoredProcedure, so that I always can look back at the work I’ve done and the notes I took during the process.
Similar to a SQL Scripts folder, I also have notes on OneNote and dendron that are just titled SQL / Tableau / PowerBI. Within these folders I’ll create notes for very specific actions I did and include websites that I used which answered questions or guided me through a process for doing something. Then if I ever think of that question again I can just search within my notes based on keywords, and find the solution a lot faster. Within these note taking apps its also been helpful for me to take screenshots of what I do or click to get to the solution I need. If I ever need to do a data migration, I have pictures documenting what to type, what success looks like, what failure looks like, and just generally how to go from start to finish for a task. These notes are for me, by me, and show me what to do for the situation I’m in. This is helpful in that all of the pictures are true to what I will run into, nothing is some fictitious scenario from a random blog. Not to discredit the help guides I’ve found since I’ve used them a ton, but sometimes I feel the slight differences in help guides create more questions for me.
Finally, the last thing I’ve found useful from note taking is archiving what you do. In the past I worked at a company where every day the person in charge had to leave a pass down for what was accomplished in the day, status updates, and just general production notes for the next day / week. Some advice for pass downs though, I would suggest taking notes throughout the day and then just combining everything together into one big file at the end. It’s a lot easier to take notes throughout the day then have to remember everything at the end. I also feel like it goes by faster taking notes as I work or when I switch tasks. By keeping track of what you do you can hold yourself accountable as well as show off all the hard work that you to your boss during your meetings. Your manager has to keep track of a lot, so make it easy for them to know you are doing a good job.
Scott
