The Bike Shed

483: Comparing notes on note-taking

The Bike Shed

Show Notes

Joël and Sally compare various note taking styles as they set out to find which ones work best for them.

The pair break down the different ways of formatting their notes and what they’re used for, Sally explains her struggles with note taking in general and the work arounds she’s found to achieve similar results instead, and Joël provides a small update on his book as he examines the different use cases for all his notes.

—

Thanks to our sponsors for this episode Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way (check the link for your free gift!), and Scout Monitoring.

Read about Joël’s note taking in depth through his thoughtbot blog posts - Blog 1 - Blog 2

Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Sally Hall.

If you would like to support the show, head over to our GitHub page, or check out our website.

Got a question or comment about the show? Why not write to our hosts: [email protected]

This has been a thoughtbot podcast.

Stay up to date by following us on social media - YouTube - LinkedIn - Mastodon - BlueSky

© 2025 thoughtbot, inc. Support The Bike Shed

More from The Bike Shed

Oct 13, 2026

Debt metaphors abound! In this week’s episode of The Bike Shed, Aji and Joel ponder the question, what are risks in a code base?

Oct 6, 2026

Joël takes Bike Shed out onto the conference floor at RailsWorld as he interviews programer and streamer Rachael Wright-Munn, aka ChaelCodes.

Sep 29, 2026

In this week’s episode of The Bike Shed, Aji and Joël dive into the distrust around the phrase ‘programmer discipline’, why you cannot just rely on willpower, and how Static Analysis tools can help with not crossing boundaries.

Sep 15, 2026

The Bike Shed is BACK! Aji and Joel kick off this week’s episode with a fantastic combination of component bugs and how much headspace they take up, historic heraldry vs ChatGPT’S anchoring bias, before diving into the latest big development of the Dev world, Github’s release of stacked PR’s.

Jul 14, 2026

It’s time to play the music, it’s time to… get Aji and Sally together again. This week’s episode is a radical one, and a listener suggestion no less; let’s Muppet-cast a software development team!

See all episodes →