alt Hacker NewsI have over the decades tried every combination I can think up or have read about for designing things and I always land back in the same place, A4 5mm square pad (cheap but not the cheapest) and a really good (but not expensive) set of ballpoints in black/blue/red/green (and mostly it's black anyway).
There is something about the complete free form nature of pen and paper that makes me think better, I bought a nice ipad/pencil a few years ago thinking that would replicate it but it didn't, it was closer but not close.
If it's something I want to keep I just take a photo but vast majority of notes are transient anyway.
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Exactly. I also use those colors.
I made a little system where blue diagrams are services I need to code and host like a nodejs server
green is stuff I need to host only like nginx, but no coding
red is external infra I can't control at all, like Anthropic's API.
And then I make drawings of how I connect them and in the end I just generate the code, so I go from pen and paper to claude code.
> A4 5mm square pad (cheap but not the cheapest) and a really good (but not expensive) set of ballpoints in black/blue/red/green
It sounds like you have some stationery recommendations!
I'm always in the market for really-good-but-not-expensive pens.
I could write an ode to the 5mm grid... Yellow Rhodia No. 16, I'm in love!
I rediscovered my university revision notes recently and I don't think it's a coincidence that the year I got my best grade was the year I went to town on very neat, carefully laid out lecture notes. Whether I was taking exquisite care over circuit diagrams or deciding which colour to make streamlines and velocity gradients, it helped bury the facts in my brain.