My New Favorite Development Tool

The Cutting Edge

Each year, many tools come out to help us code better, stay on task, and keep our notes organized. The competitive, highly stimulated, hype-driven enviroment in which developers are steeped, drives us towards the latest technology. From auto-completing text editors to command line project management tools, we have so much at our disposal. People are ecstatic about the new breakthroughs in AI to assist in making better code. Though, will it really help?

What if I were to tell you that there's a simple tool that is accessible, has been used for years, and has assisted in creating some of the worlds greatest solutions?

The Reveal

My new favorite tool is... a legal pad. About 20 cents per sheet, white pages with soft lines, black top binding with some company logo, and 50 sheets per pad. And each page usually ends up in the recycling a week later.

The Approach

I take notes in two ways. Processing and reviewing. The main question one needs to ask: "Will reviewing this in a month help me?" If the answer is no, it's a processing note. If yes, it's a reviewing note.

Processing

In my opinion, legal pads are designed to have pages ripped out. If pages are not ripped out, it becomes more uncomfortable to use.

Like writing code, getting a perfect solution on the first draft is nearly impossible. By using a notepad, I go through an iterative process of breaking down problems into smaller pieces. I get clear with the smallest sub-problem I'm trying to solve. This results in a better solution than if I were to go straight into code.

The legal pad is the birth and death of first drafts. It's where we can brute-force and over-engineer the problem, then scrap all of it, until we see the simplest solution.

Reviewing

If the concept, design, pseudocode is worth keeping, then copy it over from the legal pad to another place. It can go into another note book that is used as reference, a note taking software, or straight into code if it's clean enough.

As we continue in our careers and passions, we can accumulate solutions to problems and can borrow from our previous efforts. I recommend having a place to store these ideas. Experiment and find out a permanent solution for your reviewing notes.

Conclusion

The world of commerce will sell the idea that you need the latest contraption. We have more options for development tooling than ever. More than any text editor, note taking, productivity software, developers can step back, and go into a place that a computer and internet is not needed. We can code from a completely different part of the brain; where creative, clean, and simple solutions are born.