Ask HN: How do you do notes for a project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you do notes for a project?

Sometimes for projects I need to keep a track of chatty things I'm wondering about, reminders of what I was thinking of about on project issues, or research done/needed, and lots of other diary type stuff for my projects. In the past I have just splattered comments in the code with all this in them, but that looks ugly amateurish and I'd be embarrassed to let other people or future collaborators see. I've taken to creating a diary.md file and sticking that in the .gitignore. What do people typically do?

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I do many different things, depending on situations:

- Write notes on paper.

- Write notes in a private note file. (I use whitelisting instead of blacklisting for files in the repository, so I do not need to add it to a ignore list.)

- Write notes in a public note file. (Others may also read this if needed.) (For example, the TODO file in Free Hero Mesh.)

- Write notes in comments in the code, especially if they are closely related to that part of the code or if it seems that someone who reads it might find it helpful.

- Write notes in the public bug tracker.

- Write notes on IRC and/or NNTP. (Notes on the IRC may get lost; although they are logged, they may be hard to find again, so important notes will usually be copied into a note file too.)

Not exactly what you asked, but one idea I just picked is keeping a proper Changelog, ie, stop assuming that "Git history solved that".

And a good way to write those is to have a `## Unreleased` entry on top of `CHANGELOG.md` - the idea is to add tasks as they are being completed.

Then when a version is published/tagged/milestone, replace the "Unreleased" with "v1.2.3".

Just put it under docs directory and share it with the rest of the team. At least that's what I do, nobody complained until now, quite the opposite.

I record a screencast and save it to the project folder. I can get back up to speed on older projects easier esp since my note taking is hideous.

Sonds a bit OTT! I have visions of David Attenborough

Well some projects have lots of python scripts and data wrangling processes and it would be a big mess to me in 1 yr after not touching it again.

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