Tome files - digital equivalent of the trusty notebook

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 I've been keeping Tomes for a long time now. They are the trusty text files representing my collective experience; the tricks, techniques, and syntaxes for various systems and languages.

The name came from a bit of advice in an old article in 2600. Something along the lines of "We may be reaching the point where a notebook and pen can no longer keep up, but technology now allows us to have an always available text file equivalent. Digital Tomes."

The name stuck. It calls to mind old handwritten leather bound volumes belonging to scholars, 18th century scientists, philosophers, and other madman. It evokes a bit of science, and fiction, and RPG. 
I keep mine as simple text files, but named with a .tome extension which makes them easy to spot. 

I tend to have my most important ones constantly open as tabs in Notepad++ and reference them and update them frequently.

There's a bit of a style convention to them using dashes to represent nesting and idea breaks.



There are several reasons why I rely on them so much; a bit of it is ADHD memory, another bit is that I context switch a lot and may go months without using a particular language or system and then need to be immediately back at full speed when I do.
Mostly I'm not ashamed to write down even extremely simple things as soon as I learn them, either I'll need it later or the act of writing it will speed up the pace of learning it permanently.



Powershell.tome is now 828 lines long.
SAP.tome is 752 lines.
SQL.tome is 1601 lines.

A lot of those lines are examples of patterns, syntaxes, & concepts; they often function as small templates so that when I start a new project I bring in the techniques and formats that I liked last time.

In many ways the purpose of this blog is an extension of these tomes, just more narratively focused on "Why?".

My Tome files are the closest thing I've found to an experience bar and talent tree in real life.

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