How to Take Notes for Technical Things | Highlights and Annotations by Gistr.

This video details a note-taking system optimized for technical subjects like coding. The creator rejects traditional methods, favoring a two-pronged approach: 1) **Pre-learning ("priming")** using syllabi and introductory materials to create a course framework, and 2) **In-course note-taking**, focusing on a "framework of references" (concepts and key terms with references for details) and personal insights/connections, supplemented by complete example problem solutions. Project notes, directly within the code and README, are deemed most crucial for later reference. The creator uses digital tools (iPad Pro, Apple Pencil, Notability app) but emphasizes functionality over aesthetics. 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 each module is And 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 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, 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 some of the different 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