Sheldon Cooper has an Eidetic memory and remembers everything. It is a great advantage, but the evidence is one can do without it. And what's the point when working in a rapidly changing technological environment? When are you learning and using new technologies or facing new challenges?
A more relevant approach is to focus on skills and tools helping to solve problems. First to mind are general skills and experience.
General programming skills
Specialization is in demand, but long-term success requires:
- Understand programming logic, algorithms, architecture, and planning;
- Ability to analyze a problem and "find" the needed information and solutions;
- Learn constantly and adapt to technological evolutions;
- Share and collaborate with others.
Experience
Learning by doing is a proven method to accumulate long-term knowledge and know-how. In the programming world, it also means:
- The more problems you solve, the more you can solve
- It's all about practice, and memory is about repetition.
When it comes to remembering what has already been achieved or solved, you will recall the solution or that you have already encountered the problem and the solutions. Good organization and knowledge management practices will sort the details in this case;
Then, remembering becomes a question of discipline, organization, and structure.
Organization and Discipline
Safeguarding and formalizing accumulated knowledge and information is a habit that offers two advantages, although it takes time and systematic effort.
In the short term, curating notes is an indirect way to view and review material. Multiple and extended expositions to the materials facilitate the learning and understanding process.
In the middle term, it saves time if you have a proper structure. It's faster to refer to your notes than to search again for the solutions.
Knowledgement management system structure
The structure to safeguard your knowledge should :
- Ensure it's centralized to be easily accessible;
- Adequately backed up - You don't want years of work to go to waste;
- Easy to organize and retrieve (you don't want to waste time, and it should not be an extra hurdle).
A standard solution is a file system on a cloud drive or SharePoint for a reusable script. However, the organization is very personal and might be tedious when retrieving the needed information.
An alternative is a solution like CodeNPaste:. which replaces a folder system with a tag system and specialized index search to help you retrieve your accumulated programming knowledge and details.
You will save retrieval time and mental energy.
