Or a note-taking app like Notion or Obsidian
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](https://davidcjw.medium.com/?source=post_page—–67d1423214f9——————————–)[
](https://levelup.gitconnected.com/?source=post_page—–67d1423214f9——————————–)
We’re not geniuses, duh.
Unless you have a photographic memory and can remember all the language syntax and commands you’ve ever typed, including those crazy regex ones, you’d need a second (metaphorical) brain like Notion or Obsidian.
No but seriously, as engineers, we absorb new knowledge on a daily basis. We learn new technologies, move on from them, learn more new technologies — the cycle repeats itself.
Don’t take it from me — here’s what GitHub CoPilot suggests is the lifecycle of an engineer:
GitHub CoPilot in action
Don’t get me wrong though — the idea isn’t to create a database of everything you’ve learnt (besides, that’s what the internet is for).
The idea is simply to have a centralised place to aggregate all your thoughts, take notes, jot down meeting minutes, pin down ideas and most importantly, store commonly used code snippets.
Here’s why it’s important.
1. Stimulating the brain’s retrieval system
There’s one key difference between notes created by you and those on the internet — personalization. They contain elements of you — the way you think, organize points and digest information.
As engineers, whenever we need to re-use a piece of technology that we’ve been out of touch for a while, we often only require a specific piece of information, activating a particular type of memory recall known as cued recall.
Cued recall refers to recalling things using cues and guides [1]. By taking down notes or writing down code snippets at some historical point in time, future references to it help to immediately trigger pieces of information associated with that information.
In layman’s terms, our notes act as a starting point of reference, helping us recall specific information like API usage or language syntax, aiding memory retrieval.
2. Memory consolidation
Our brain is good at storing information but not great at indexing them— at least not in the long-term.