This blog is all about your personal notes in Confluence. If you document your personal notes on Confluence you can improve the documentation, be organized well and be able to share your personal notes easily.
These are the questions that I will try to answer here. Short answer: Improve your organization of personal notes!
If you don’t use it yet, it will hopefully improve your documentation. If you are already a user of the Confluence personal space you might get some new aspects. And if you already use it please comment, so I can learn from your experience!
I often find myself copying bash snippets from the internal project documentation or the internet. Most likely, I need to adapt some parts of it to fit my needs. And even more likely I need to do this regularly. Naturally I started a .txt document that contained the commands that I needed regularly. I couldn’t move these commands into the project space because these commands contained Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) from my devices, my personal directory setup and similar customizations. However, I also found myself often to copy these commands and send them over to my team collegues. Until that day when one team collegue sent me a link to his personal Confluence space.
The personal space of the team collegue contain a list where he had his own collection of commands. That was the moment I startet to move all my commands to my own Confluence space.
You can even start a free plan for your private personal notes: Confluence Free
My Confluence personal space at work currently looks like this:
Note how Confluence will sort these pages automatically if you don’t add a number in front. For me, this is just fine.
My personal space starts with a landing page. On this page I list links that I (currently) often need. I perfer to save the links here as I can also add addtional notes to theses links/sites and organise them in a table. However, I do not save links that all of the team need regulary. I won’t let this page become a project space starting page. That should be in the project documentation.
I work as a hard- and firmware developper, so the backend is not my focus area. However, I also find myself look up things in the backend and occasionally need some more specific infos that I store here. Additionally, I can complement the documentation with notes that backend developpers do not need, but help me to understand their area.
As we use git and work on linux I regularly need to look up the commands that I do not need on a daily basis. However, I often need the same or similar commands.
For example I have the command
git fetch -p origin
just to remind me, that from time to time I can clean up my local branches.
Or more complex commands, for example the following to print local branches that are not on the remote
git branch --format "%(refname:short) %(upstream)" | awk '{if (!$2) print $1;}'
that I once found here.
The benefit of having them saved on the Confluence personal space is that I am able to adapt the commands to the personal needs. For example in our repository our squad works on the feature branch squad-xx. I therefore adapted the command to delete local branches that are merged on the remote to automatically inlcude this squad-xx branch but also work on our other repositories with a different main/master branch.
git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\*|master|main|squad-xx)" | xargs git branch -d
In the field of general linux commands for example, I saved the command to create a virtual python environment with a different python version than the default one. And I also have several prepared grep commands to speed up my search process.
The Project Stuff and Testsetup Stuff pages contain commands that I personalised with my directory layout and the Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) of my devices. This is the page I probably use the most as I just cannot remember the UUIDs.
If I do not know yet where to put a new page or if I am hunting bugs and do not know if it will be benefitial to post the process and findings in the project documentation, I create a new temporary page here. The big advantage is that the page is already correctly formatted if it turns out to be important for the project. Additionally, I can start documenting the bug hunting like a diary and I can easily consult help from my team colleages and share my progress. But thesese pages may only reside temporarily in my Confluence personal space. If they are important for the project, I move them into the project space. Otherwise I delete them afterwards.
The setup of the Confluence personal space is straigth forward:
Now you already have your personal space.
To give access, you can simply:
If you want to restrict a specific page, you can do this directly on the page using the lock symbol at the top, next to the navigation bar. However, I do not use restricted pages.
A page can easily be moved, even accross spaces:
As you probably could see, I put several notes in the Confluence personal space as an addition to the project space. I think it is important, that the personal space never contains information that other team collegues need regularly. If so, you should most probably move this information into the project space. In contrast, I also do not think that the information like commands prepared for my UUIDs belongs into the project space documentation.
What is your work flow? Where do you store your notes? How do you handle such informations and code snippeds?
Do you prefer *.txt documents, OneNote or Word / LibreOffice documents?
Feel free to comment and share your experience.
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