https://blog.nelhage.com/2010/05/software-and-lab-notebooks/

Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike chemists and biologists who are trailed to obsessively document everything they do in their lab notebooks, computer scientists are taught to document the end results of their work, but aren't, in general, taught to take notes as they go, and document the steps they take in building a system. 6.005, MIT's new introductory software engineering class, attempted to require its students to keep lab notebooks for a few semesters, and was met with near-universal complaints and ridicule from the students (“Lab notebooks?

2010-05-02T23:14:14Zhttps://blog.nelhage.com/post/Nelson ElhageRecent content in Posts on Made of Bugs2026-09-16T11:37:03Zrss20false60Nelson Elhagenelson-elhage0"5b2ae9eec2e293572f6ae5a000bd0161-ssl-df"200utf-8