So, I obviously never got around to posting any research papers (blame my boss, apparently there are patents in them thar papers).

Anyhow, playing on a personal project (calendar and project management system for GTK on BSD) I realized one of my bad habits might have applicability to a wider audience. During the development stage, a required file in my world is called "developer.notes". The point is pretty straight forward, it's a repository of my thoughts, rants, comments, etc about the code I'm working on. I never allow it to leave the project (i.e. no one who hasn't worked on the software will see my notes). It captures almost everything, since it's convenient, it's a great way to think with my keyboard and I know it won't ship as part of the final package. It is, however, exceptionally useful as a reminder, developer documentation, whatever.

Some sample paragraph openings (I see no need to share the entire note set):

Thoughts for evolution...apparently MySQL can dump as XML, so...

Look! I documented the data structures.

Next up, start building even more happy little dialog boxen.

This is horrifying, I'm not even half way to alpha and...

You get the idea, I hope. If you find this a useful idea, please use it and share. If you've already been doing this, well done. Otherwise, have a great week-end.