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>In the past couple of weeks I've made a point of writing out the ideas and reasoning behind what I'm doing before writing any code. What I'm finding is I spend a relatively long amount of time at this, but even without writing code, I'm finding issues with my solutions on paper.

Yup. In my last project, I spent 6 months designing and redesigning a solution, with small experiments as PoCs, and ultimately built the solution in about a month. It was a complex project and a distributed application. However, I faced surprisingly few hurdles during the actual coding part.

I realized that, apart from programming competition level problems, for day to day applications that get work done, programming is 80% mind work and 20% coding, debugging, testing, etc.

I find the two mental states of keys on keyboard, executing algorithms and designing programs to be almost antithetical. I do much better when I first spend 5 min or so (preferably away from a screen) writing out for myself what is it I’m about to code. Its like my brain can calmly contemplate many more options when “offline” but as soon as I’m in front of a machine it wants to get from a to z as fast and easily as possible.

Another anecdote: The point in my life where I felt like I thought the most clearly and quickly about programming was when I used pen/pencil and paper.

I learned a lot of my development skills on paper, not on computers. Lots of exams, programs, etc. All written out by hand.

Now what's nice about paper as a medium is you're not restricted to just text you can mix in drawings and pretty much anything else to attack your thinking from different angles. You could do this on a computer, but it's just so much slower to draw out diagrams and doesn't have the same feeling.

I like to think I'm a decent programmer and I'm also a down right terrible hobbyist illustrator/cartoonist.

Over the years I've filled notebook after notebook with a mix of hand written notes and bad illustrations to help solidify the ideas in my own mind. Occasionally I will page back through looking for something I remember I wrote down, but most of it is just to help myself in the moment.

As an extension of this, when someone comes and asks me a question I start with a verbal explanation. If it isn't clicking for the person I quickly reach for a pen or a whiteboard marker and start drawing diagrams while I talk. This usually leads to a quicker "aha" moment for the person; a picture is worth a thousand words.

For a long time it was not something I considered much; it's just been an extension of how I think for as long as I can remember.

Sometime back I ran into an ex-colleague; we hadn't worked together in about a decade. After the usual chit chat of catching up she said to me, "Do you still doodle when you work? I will always remember how you constantly drew pictures of everything and how it made things so much easier to understand. I hope you still do that.". I laughed and told her how surprised I was that someone would even remember that after so many years, but that yes I continued to draw pictures of my thoughts like I always had.

> I completely failed

I'd encourage you to rethink this idea. GoodNotes and OneNote and Notability are fairly good at making the experience more robust than pen/paper. Especially the search function. It's so refreshing to not shift 100 pages to find one or two sentences.

Just the default iPad Notes app can search hand-written notes.

For meetings, I use a Neo smartpen. It writes on paper but records what it writes, time-stamped, with sync to Evernote, gdrive, and others. The app that backs it will also let you see what you wrote when, so you can electronically see your notes from a particular meeting.

It also tries to sync notes against calendar entries, but I don't remember much about that feature.

For notes for myself, nothing beats a nice fountain pen and a high quality notebook. It's relieving how well my thoughts just fall out of my head onto paper.

> In the past couple of weeks I've made a point of writing out the ideas and reasoning behind what I'm doing before writing any code. What I'm finding is I spend a relatively long amount of time at this, but even without writing code, I'm finding issues with my solutions on paper.

I've done this for a long time and have observed similar benefits, but I often just type out the plan in a text editor with lot of bullet points instead. Do you find that physically writing aids in the process?

You might want to think about a smart pen. I had one that wrote in standard Moleskine-style notebooks, and then the notes could be exported from the pen as PDFs.

It was also supposed to do some kind of OCR and make the PDFs searchable, but I never tried that.

You forgot that it is satisfying. I moved to a spiral wipe notebook and find I can sketch and write notes much faster before dragging yet another box, look for text label, etc. Which usually results in losing the fleeting thought.

I do some machine engineering math at work and the conviniece of pen and paper over computer text is just silly. I just scan the notes and send in emails.

This is why I want a reMarkable.