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Highly recommend reading the book "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll. This book started as a journal by Cliff when he worked at Berkeley Labs in the late 80's. He was an astronomer-turned-IT, and in science I guess they are just in the habit of writing things down.

A few months and teletraces later his journal was thick enough to publish into a book, so he did exactly that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg



When my dev team started at a company that was basically run by biochemists (we were all hired to start up a specific product), they gave us all really nice lab notebooks, I guess out of habit.

Ten years later, I had used about 5 pages of mine. My two teammates wrote more, but none of us went past page 50 or so. OTOH, the scientists we worked with had gone through multiple books by that time.

It's not an easy habit to get into.


Lab notebooks can be important for patent purposes. No surprise the chemists are meticulous.


I really enjoyed reading this book too. It's an interesting story about finding a hacker and Cliff has a great writing style.




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