I never took notes when following a book or online tutorial but now that I've dropped a lot of money on an online coding school, I want to make sure I type out information I'm learning. If I'm taking notes I'm kind of talking to myself as I do so that I'm going over the material a second time. Now that I need to go back to refer to my notes, I figured out that I started out in a disorganized way.
Something that I learned when starting this school is that you can create a wiki or you can create Gists on Github.com. I'm using Gists as a note taking method. You can save each Gist as a certain file. The suggested way of taking notes (from what I've been told) is to use the Markdown language. A cheatsheet can be found here. I had heard of Markdown briefly before in some article I read but never gave it any notice. If you give your Gist a file extension of .md, it will display what you typed in as a formatted Markdown page. Oh, because I didn't want people seeing my stupid comments and questions to myself, I flagged my notes as "secret" so that only I can see them. If I share the link with anyone else, that would be able to see my notes as well.
Now that I'm getting into some material/topics in the online school where I'm needing to refer back to my notes, I'm wishing I had organized my notes in a completely different way. I created a secret Gist for every single module or as Bloc calls them, checkpoints. I wish I had started a Gist for every topic. For example, I wish I had a Gist for all of my git notes, a gist for RSpec type notes, a Gist for command line notes and so on.
If I can get ahead in the material a little, I'm going to go back to combine my notes into topics rather than checkpoints. If I could figure out how to search just my own Gists, it wouldn't be that bad but when I want to refer back to material I need to look at again, I have to remember what checkpoint Gist to go back to.
Anyway, hopefully I'll have more technical topics to share next week along with lessons learned.
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