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Comment by musiccog | Hacker News Reader

> It taught very valuable lessons, Especially not to type rm -rf without checking multiple times.

"Measure twice, cut once."

One of the many uses I have for a mindmap in my daily use (Freemind 0.9.0!), is as a place to write out sysadmin/sql commands in a structured way before executing them.

If I can test it on dev before production - great. If I have to run it directly on production, following this method (religiously!) has saved me from any catastrophic (read unrecoverable) issues.

When you are under pressure it can be easy to say 'I don't have time to write out the commands'.

When touching production servers, you need to spend the extra minute or so to write it out.

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Can you maybe go into a bit more detail about how you use Freemind? It's not something I've heard somebody do before and it sounds interesting.

Sure.

I use freemind but there are lots of other mind mapping programs available these days.

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I have mentioned freemind a lot in my posts, but I guess I have never really gone into how I have used it over a really long time. First started using it around 2012 and have been building my local knowledgebase/library ever since.

With full text indexing on I can search a local directory for when I have (successfully!) used something like mysqldump and the context it was used it. Have found this is significantly faster and more reliable then just trusting google/stackoverflow - especially for edgecases I have solved in the past.

I use freemind 0.9.0 (self-compiled) as I have found it is the most reliable and never crashes version. Currently running with jdk1.8.0 with an override script on OSX Catalina.

How I use it:

- program.mm e.g. mysql.mm

Evolved into program-feature.mm

   e.g. mysql-mysqldump.mm

Evolved into program/program-feature.mm

   e.g. mysql/mysql-mysqldump.mm

- as a daily worktracker (week ending on the Sunday)

   e.g. weekend-20121024.mm

Each day gets it's own tree/node:

weekend-20121024

   Mon 18/10

      JIRA-123 Fix database blah.id issue

Each node can then be written out, colour-coded (red for copy-paste bash commands, light blue for sql), and finally copy-pasted in a chunk in order (windows users be careful of selection order).

Just did a wc -l on my 'program' mindmaps since 2012: 2604

Can you give examples of what your nodes look like, say in mysqldump? Or maybe a screenshot? It sounds like something I'd like to try.

Also, what motivated or inspired you to use Freemind in this fashion?

I think I originally found it on a /. story sometime in 2012 and tried it out as more organised local txt file documentation system.

And I loved the fact that I could write out the 'plan', test it, and then copy/paste into a terminal.

I really started it as I was compiling from source a lot (still do) in those days, and there were always little quirks that had to be worked out on different platforms.

For example the mysql/mysql-compiling.mm mindmap was created to provide copy/paste installations for Percona-mysql on Linux and OSX.

The weekly/daily mindmaps are my primary working space.

I wasn't running Jira at the time, and Freemind is faster anyway.

When writing something new in a daily node, I can then copy it into the appropriate program/program-function.mm Then I started experimenting with colours and icons and came up with my own system: - green (F3) for search questions - red (F4) for bash cmds - blue (F7) for sql cmds

https://i.ibb.co/GWmfhMf/freemind-mysql-replication-screensh...

This is pretty awesome. Thanks for answering my questions, it's been insightful. I've been messing around with Freemind for the past hour and I'm liking this. This has definitely inspired me to experiment with it further.

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