How to Take Notes for Technical Things

the outline method the mindmap method the Cornell method some sort of box method these are all not taking methods that I do not use you see the problem with these note-taking methods is that it's more about information about memorizing information for things like coding designing infrastructure math it's not about the information that you memorize you have truly learned those things only if you're able to implement them and actually use them so if you try taking notes using these styles that are all about memorization and information retention then you're going to end up wasting a lot of time and not optimize on actually learning the technical things so in this video I'm going to talk about how to take notes specifically for things like coding and other technical stuff I'll start off with talking about the tools that I use then the pre-learning note taking techniques that helps me learn faster then I'll talk about my two pron system for note taking the first part is when I take notes when I'm learning the concepts and I do this thing which I refer to as the framework of references and this is for optimize faster learning as well as being able to re access information easily then the second problem of this not is on the projects themselves now before we get started I just want to let you guys know that I have a newsletter called boops keyboard it is a Weekly Newsletter about learning coding as well as basically how to get your together so if that sounds interesting to you definitely check it out over here also linked in description also this video is sponsored by short form but more about them later in the

video okay so let's first talk about the tools that I use up until like four or five months ago I used to take notes purely on paper but I then got an iPad Pro and have never looked back since so now all of my notes are digital so in case you're curious about the full specs it is an iPad Pro third generation 11 in with 128 gigs of capacity I also got the apple pencil um as well as the magic keyboard and the case covering over here as well so it's like the full set sorry these are my notes for this video but for the screen I do have um a screen covering it's called paper feels you might have heard of the screen protector called paper like it's really similar um but it's just half the price and I like it quite a lot the resolution is decent the only complaint have is when I write on it the nib of my apple pencil does wear down pretty quickly for denot taking itself I use the app called notability I like it because it's really easy to use you can easily split stuff highlight stuff I also really like that it has this dotted paper uh which I prefer to line paper or blank paper because I'm able to easily write stuff and I can also draw diagrams on it so the way that I use notability is for each course that I take I generally just have one huge running dock where I put all my notes for that course in that one

document okay next let's talk about pre-learning I use this technique called priming which is defined as introducing information before the lesson occurs and there's a lot of research that shows that by doing priming it really helps with better understanding of information and also better long-term retention of that information the way that I do priming when I have a course is that I look at the syllabus and the structure of the course understanding where each module is and what I would generally go and watch the introduction of each of these modules I take some brief notes that form this outline of the information I'm about to learn and I also take notes of what the projects are specifically and in addition to that I also do priming of the Capstone project itself unfortunately not all courses have a capsum project so in the event that there is no capsul project I would generally just have a project that I have in mind that I wanted to do in the first place I go through the project description looking at the read me and any starter code that is provided and I try to understand how the different files and the different functions are interacting with each other by doing this in addition to the benefits from priming itself it also helps me a lot with just being motivated because often times when you're going through a technical course it's usually not like you're like oh this is so exciting all these concepts are so exciting it's more like you want to learn that course so you're able to apply it to a project I actually started doing this thing where I start the Capstone project first and then obviously I run into something that I don't know how to do so then I would actually go back to that section learn that section and then continue with the implementation I do find that after I started doing this it's actually helped a lot in keeping my motivation really high and also learning a lot faster as well so this priming method I talk about for taking notes on technical things is actually a general method that is super useful for taking notes for other stuff as well for example I also use it for books and the way that I do priming is through short form who is the sponsor of today's video thank you short form is a platform that makes amazing book guides that are way more than just the book summary each book guide has a one pager which I like to use to choose the book and also a super detailed book guide with a lot of more details the way that I use short form for priming is that I look at the structure of those notes this gives me a good idea a of how the book itself is structured and by reading those notes I have an understanding of what each of these chapters or different sections are covering I did this for a book that I read pretty recently called the body keeps the score it is about trauma and how Insidious and destructive it can be for a person's life highly recommend it is a really dense book though so was especially useful to use priming in order to understand the structure of the book shr has a wide selection of books across lots of different genres like psychology business and money and finance they have new book guides and articles that drop every single week and subscribers can vote on which book they want to be covered next if you're a subscriber to this channel the next 100 visitors will receive a 20% discount the annual subscription fee by going to this link over here also linked in description all right back to the video all right now that we finished talking about the pre-learning techniques let's

now talk about how I take notes as I'm going through the course itself as I said earlier my note taking technique really optimizes on two different things the first one is to be able to use not taking to learn faster and the second one is being able to re access the information easily and the way that I do this is by focusing on three different things the first one is creating a framework of references what this means is that as I'm going through the course and taking notes I mostly focus on writing down the concepts and the terms I'm trying to paint this big picture kind of like a bird's eye view of how these different concepts these different components fit into each other so I'm understanding how everything fits together in order to produce the thing that I'm trying to learn about I don't bother trying to write down like every single little detail and trying to understand how every single little thing works because you can always Google it and just refresh yourself in the future if you want to I also write down what I call references so for specific Concepts I think is really important or is something that I feel like is going to be hard to Google I would write down the page number where if you're looking at a video course like the timestamp and the chapter of that in this way if future Tina one day wants to come back and wants to know the exact details again about that specific thing I can then just go to that place of reference and then just watch that small portion of that video again to get the information okay so I know that probably sounds a little bit abstract so let me try to make this concrete for you guys I'm going to give you an example of the blockchain course that I'm currently taking for example in this section of my notes I'm talking about consensus algorithms um don't worry if you don't know what that means just focus more on how it is I'm taking these notes so don't worry about the terminology so there's basically a bunch of different consensus algorithms which is really important for the blockchain for example proof of stake and proof of work each of these consensus algorithms you can go into a lot more detail about this but all I have written over here is proof of work um hard to produce and easy to validate and also for proof of stake votes to those with most steak now if I wanted to come back and look at the details in the future I can refer to this timestamp over here to look at that specific part of the course or I can just Google it because I know the terms proof of work proof of stake as you can see I also do some very simple color coding like nothing crazy over here so green for titles this pinkish color for Concepts and yellow for stuff I would like to emphasize don't go crazy and have a bunch of different colors or anything like that if you just make it as simple as possible it's the easiest to be consistent so it's really easy for you to remember which color corresponds to which thing as you can see I don't take a lot of notes and I don't go into a lot of details and it is definitely not aesthetic but it is functional I do want to make a note that something that I should be doing but I keep forgetting to do um is actually typing down some of the different terms and titles so I'm able to go back and actually just like command F or like contr f search for things instead of having to scroll down um that's something that I will try my best to incorporate in the future if I don't forget all right so the second thing that I focus on actually writing down in my notes is my own insights and connections this is a technique that focuses on learning information from a several different perspectives like making analogies for things connecting concepts by yourself research shows that doing this is far better than just passively consuming information we like transcribing information this allows you to process the information at a deeper level like it's able to strengthen the connections between your brain cells which then results in deeper understanding and better memory and retention over here is an example in my notes of the different relationships of transactions this isn't something that was explicitly said in the course this was just me making that connection by myself and writing it down okay now the third thing that I take notes on is full examples of things as you're working through your course the way that information is generally presented is that you would learn about one subject or like one concept right and then you would learn about another concept this is all well and good except all these different concepts are like kind of like isolated pieces of information that don't really mean anything until you put them all together say you're working on like a math or physics problem right and then you would like be like oh okay like I understand how this works and how this works but then when you actually have to do a problem often times you don't actually know how to do that problem because you only knew like conceptually the different pieces of information but you didn't really know how to put everything together to solve that real problem by writing out a full example of how a question is being solved where like the way that an entire process is being done you're able to get a much better understanding of the full picture of things an example of this in my blockchain notes over here um is the transaction life cycle here so this is the entire transaction life cycle of having one Bitcoin being transferred from person a to person B and it goes through all these different steps in order to get there all right let's now

talk about project notes pay attention because these notes are the ones that I think are the most important and the ones that I reference back the most as well this project over here is one of the first projects in the blockchain course the course content covers what a block is conceptually but now comes the implementation portion first you go and download the starter code then as I'm working through that project struggling through the project usually um I would take notes on two things the first one it's notes that will help me remember how the different parts of the code fit together I write these notes on the read me document of this project cuz if you're anything like me I would do a project and then like four months later or something and I come back to it and I just like have absolutely no idea what happened in the project and then I have to go through like all the code again trying to figure this out and the second thing I take notes on is the things that are really important in the implementation things that are often not like immediately obvious that you need to do but if you don't do them it can cause like a really big headache trying to figure it out I do this just by making comments throughout the code okay now let's look at this example of a project in which you create a class of a block and then have an app that en calls it and makes an instance of it this is a really simple project just for illustration purposes for clarity purposes so in the read me over here I just wrote that there's two parts of it the first code file is where the class of a block is being defined and the second one is basically just the main method that's able to create an instance of that block class for the block class there's already a lot of documentation here from the starter code thank you starter code uh the only big thing that I wrote down as comment to emphasize is that I need to make sure that I'm using a promise which is important for async operations so I hope that was a good example in showing you what these notes on the projects look like um of course as your projects get more complex you would have like more notes that are here the read me is also going to be more complex as you're writing out how all the different files fit together but the overall structure is still the same generally if you just follow the conventions of the coding language that you're using um usually that covers the majority of the documentation that you do need so for example making sure that you document your classes your methods properly and just like using functions properly helper functions properly things like that so yeah this is how I document the notes directly on the projects themselves um and after I complete the course when I'm doing my own project where like wanting to refer back and stuff I have found that overwhelmingly most of the time I would be looking either exclusively we're like focusing a lot of attention on the project notes themselves the concepts and stuff like it's all good to know but implementation is usually what I'm coming back for and these project notes have be invaluable in Saving me time all right this is all I have for you guys today my entire note-taking process for technical things I hope you found this helpful and do let me know in the comments like what you think about my process as well as how it is that you take notes for technical things I am always down for improving my system as well and I will see you guys in the next video we live stream