As you work on projects, you’ll often find yourself making and keeping notes. These could range from whole step-by-step guides to little snippets. You know that eventually, you’ll be back at this point, and you’ll need this little nugget of knowledge again. I like to encourage people to keep their notes in a public place. In the context of an organisation “public” may just mean internally with others in the engineering team (I don’t literally mean go and post it on X!). You can spend a few more minutes tidying up the note to turn it into a mini “doc” (which is even easier now with AI). Notes are just a manifestation of your knowledge, and this slowly and organically helps you offload your knowledge into a searchable and sharable place.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. Indeed, most people probably prefer these sorts of docs to get straight to the point, so keeping it concise isn’t just a shortcut, it’s an optimisation. With the growing use of AI tools, keeping knowledge in a “public” accessible place for your organisation has the added bonus of giving AI agents more context, so that they can better help you with your work. This isn’t the same as (nor is it intended to replace) long-form, technical documentation, which often follows a template and goes through scrutiny, review and approval. This is simply an act of “making your notes public”, and in doing so, slowly sharing your knowledge.