It’s not a new device, there’s been a few generations since then but it’s still close to perfect, I can scribble notes as quickly as I like and don’t notice a problem. For the highlighter I tilt the pencil a bit for a fatter highlighter, I’m sure it would be a good for artists.
Hit up an apple shop and try it out… I’m really not a shill for apple, I thought the pencil was stupid until I got it and started using it (I can buy a pencil and eraser for a £), I’m not saying it’s _worth_ the cost, but I love it
I use my iPad (and I pencil or whatever it’s called) for reading technical books, legal documents, tech documentation etc. then I write notes, thoughts, todos, questions all over it, it’s extremely useful for summarizing a boring document, then going back any pulling out the important bits
I also use my iPad for dissecting sheet music in a similar way
One day I hope to stick it on my wall and have a max headroom type avatar that greets me and turns on my roomba etc. until then value I get out of the above ^^ is worth the silly price tag
I’ve tried c4/plantuml (and loved the concept) but have never been able to make it stick, it always seems to get out of date quickly and having a feeling of “I’m not sure if this is up to date” is worse than no documentation at all (because you need to learn the documentation, then the behaviour). Honestly the fastest way I’ve found to understand large distributed systems is by observing the interactions between them, schema detection in service bus type architecture and tools like X-ray (in aws) or open tracing give you a good picture of “this thing produces or consumes this type of message”
For individual systems I think a good inversion of control/dependency injection system can give you a good overview of the connections between components.
If I’m stepping into a giant ball of spaghetti code I generally set the debugger at line 1 and start stepping, and draw a lot of boxes and lines as I go… then throw those drawings away when I’m done. They’re really only helpful while you’re producing them (like taking notes as you read a textbook), hopefully in that situation you improve the code as you go so this approach isn’t as necessary!
Hah! I did the exact same thing for ages on paper and eventually evolved the system to manage my workload and context switching… I still use it a lot for going deep while debugging/understanding code. I ended up making it into an app when I broke my wrist and could still type but couldn’t hold a pen. I can’t remember if there’s rules about self promotion in comments here but it’s up at journalist mode dot com
This is basically how I cram as much productive work into a day that I can, with the goal of strategically dealing with rabbit holes, context switch, constant learning etc.
I've been doing this on paper for ages but I broke my wrist, I couldn't hold a pen but I could type so I figured I'd make it into a thing, polish it up and put it out into the world.
The name comes from Cal Newports book Deep Work, where he's talking about professions where you need to constantly switch between going really deep on a task, but are constantly needing to context switch... which I think applies to a lot of people in tech.
You'll probably want to skim the medium post linked from the website so it makes sense.
I find that my procrastination comes from tasks that my brain thinks are too hard, so what I do is I make todo lists, I break the task down into smaller more manageable tasks until they're small enough to digest easily. The more tired/cbf/bored I am, the smaller I make the tasks.
Also, for avoiding distractions I usually keep a piece of paper on my desk titled "distractions", if my mind wanders, I write down the thing it wandered to, if it happens again I put a dot next to that thing, surprisingly I never get more than a few dots before it's completely out of my mind for the day.
I kind of feel like this is somewhat related to the whole concept of mindfulness, rather than being stuck in your own distractions you observe them and move on... These two things help me immensely.
Hit up an apple shop and try it out… I’m really not a shill for apple, I thought the pencil was stupid until I got it and started using it (I can buy a pencil and eraser for a £), I’m not saying it’s _worth_ the cost, but I love it