Probably the most useful of these things and the one tool that I find still today unused is right here. You keep a notebook.
I’m astonished at how few people write things down. And by writing things down, I don’t mean you keep a log in the back of one of your Unix boxes. No, I mean your handwriting. Because. Well, when I was at observatories, the idea was if you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen! It’s one thing to collect a huge log, and it’s another thing to have a system that will analyze this log (of which I had a delightful chat not half an hour ago with people who have built wonderful software to analyze logs and IP tables and watching for intrusions).
But having done so, having done so, there’s still a question of how do you, how do you actually - how do you actually communicate this to others? It’s necessary to summarize, think about it, and I find there’s no substitute for a real logbook.
This guy is the real-life Rick from Rick & Morty (here he is cobbling together robots out of spare parts) and here he is giving a fantastically engaging talk and demonstrating the virtues of handicraft and taking notes in a logbook.