Keeping track of all your knowlege

[NikChillin]

Interesting, we are going through this process right now too. Interesting options discussed which we hadn't thought of too.

[unixman_again]

At work, we use a wiki at work to keep shared knowledge in. A lot of the info there-in is out of date and there is reluctance by some of us to update it. In the 35 years that I've been in computing, I've always documented everything, so the work that I have done over the two years that I've been at the college are fully documented. As to whether anyone reads it, well that's another story. When I was network manager at the first school I was at, all the knowledge was on a wiki. A few weeks after I left, I received an email from my replacement who wanted to know something. "It's all on the wiki", I replied. "Oh, I deleted that as it was crap", came the reply. "Not crap, you didn't understand the value, and I've forgotten how what you want to know was setup. Ha! Ha! Ha!" I was very pissed off with this school. When I resigned, I said I'd stay if they made me a sensible offer. They said there was no more money available and then promptly advertised my role with a £4K increase.

 

I also keep a day book, which is basically a notepad full of scribbles. I only throw these away when I leave the job and they prove semi-useful in remembering stuff. I call this my PDA and it's a random access file system

 

At home, I use a simple text file to document stuff that I want to remember.

 

For my extensive LP/CD/cassette collection, that is documented using a database system that I wrote myself, that is fully implemented in a 33K Bash script. It's completely transportable (well provided you have Bash) and the data is stored in thousands of flat files. Some are indexes and others data records. I designed most of it on a long haul flight and it has been morphed into two other systems, one for my books and the other for by DVD/VHS tapes. When I was out of work a couple of years ago, I rewrote in Perl/Tk so it now has a proper GUI on it. It's still compatible with the Bash version too.