Computers and Me

My adventure in computers and software development began in my Junior year of high school when I took my first computer class - BASIC programming on an TRS‑80 Model I computer. It was a primitive time. We had to save our programs on cassette tape at the end of class, and the technology was so unreliable that you would usually save at least 3 copies of your program to have any hope of being able to reload the program the next day of class. Even so, I was hooked, and by the end of that year it was obvious that I would pursue some sort of career in engineering or programming.

I was so fascinated with the material, and so motivated to push the boundaries of my knowlege, that I took the BASIC reference manual home with me each night and studied the commands that we had not yet learned in class. The next day I would try out some of the new commands I had read about the night before. After only a couple weeks of doing this, it became clear that I now knew far more about computer programming than did the teacher.

One day I asked the teacher how you would sort an array of names in alphabetical order (a relevant question, as I had not noticed any type of "SORT" command in the reference manual I was reading). The teacher said he didn't think there was any way to do it. I knew there had to be a way, and promptly set off to write a sort routine, my first real attempt at actual computer science work.

Notebooks and Me

My 9th grade science teacher, Mr. Ahlstrom, introduced us to notebooking. We were required to submit a notebook at the end of each semester as part of our grade. He taught us about what kind of notebook binders were best to use and how to separate the notebook into separate tabbed sections. We were required to number each page of the notebook, and to include a table of contents section at the beginning of the notebook.

The concept of notebooking suited my personality, and fit in well with my tendency to want to collate and synthesize my knowlege, as I had done later in my BASIC programming class when I took the manual home at night. All throughout college, I used the techniques Mr. Ahlstrom had taught me about organizing my notebooks, keeping a separate notebook for each class I took. The process helped me study, learn the material more thoroughly, and have better recall of the material later.

Orchestrating disparate information into a well-organized, cohesive body of knowledge is still in my blood today, and is the DNA that drives these online notebooks you are reading now. The ultimate motivation is to allow developers to "stay in the flow" by providing instant recall of large bodies of technical material used in software development, in a way that raw Google searches and brower bookmarks cannot match. I find Google searches to be too non-deterministic to match these notebooks, and browser bookmarks too difficult to use for large numbers of bookmarks. And of course, these notebooks provide a pure, ad-free content experience.

Over the years I've tried many different notebooking and note-taking technologies, including of course the popular Evernote and Microsoft OneNote applications. I find that they are both inadequate for organizing material in the way I've organized these online notebooks. While I use those tools for other things, when it comes to creating a final, online body of work such as this, nothing I've found works as well as the full power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

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