dinsdag 14 juni 2005

Kevin Dangoor: "Have people not been using outliners because they don’t like to work that way, or because they’re unaware of the tools?"
  8:33:17 PM    comment []  trackback []

Using an outliner for programming notes
Dave Luebbert: "I'm guessing there will be programmers in twenty years who will be consulting their opml collection to remember what they used to do."

I think Dave 's right. I'm using my outliner already to work as he described. When I need to work on a project, I open a new outline and save the empty file with the name of the project. Often, I start with the date as the first heading, and I start to make notes beneath that. Every now and then a project leader gives me a numbered todo-list for a project, and I copy every item into my outliner.When I've done that, I start explaining every item of the list to myself in the outline, writing down things like 'I need to change this or that to achieve this' or 'see file.php, line 23 for this' so I can easily navigate trough my work. When reporting back to the project leader, I use the notes in the outline to describe what I've done to make things work.

Outlined thinking really helps me working. Without an outliner, I would have pen and paper with me, and a stack of notes on my desk next to my computer. These notes would have been full of junk because it's not as easy to handle as an outline is. Apart from that, I have very crappy handwriting, so using a pen is never my first choice.

When I use an outline to create an image of what I'm doing, I have an overview that helps me work. And it acts as a backup. A while ago I lost some files on which I've been working. I made changes in them for a project, but the files got deleted before I could put them back into the version control system, so I had to do it all over again. Fortunately, I described everything I did in my outliner, enabling me to re-do the work I did exactly the same way.

My outliner, at work,  is the open source release of Frontier. It's not mainly an outliner, and it doesn't save outlines as OPML (it saves as .ftop, what's that anyway?), but it works. At home, I use Radio. I am hoping to use Dave Winers new outliner to work with OPML at work, so I can share things with Radio at home and publish outlines for others to see.
  7:40:28 AM    comment []  trackback []