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I ❤️ Really Good Notes

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At egghead our workshops are accompanied by Really Good Notes.

Really Good Notes can take a variety of formats:

They can be a combination of those things too, which is where good notes start to become Really Good Notes.

A good note can range from the size of a tweet to an entirely new course summarized from for the original content.

In many ways, an egghead workshop is an example of really good notes! Documentation for your favorite JavaScript library? You got it. They are (hopefully) good notes too.

Good notes provide context and insight. They explore holes in the material, fill in gaps, expand with alternative ideas, question the answers given, and give us a stronger sense of depth and understanding.

At egghead we love progressive summarization. This is a technique designed to give us discoverable notes that are a lifetime asset.

If we could, we would supply Really Good Notes with every event, course, workshop, and lesson that we produce and publish.

Notes.

An example of Really Good Notes for an egghead course comes from Taylor Bell. His notes on Dan Abramov's Redux course have thousands of stars on Github. Dozens of people have contributed to making them better over time. They were so good that they got Taylor recognized and hired at egghead full-time 😳

Really Good Notes aren't static! That's one of the key points of progressive summarization. We can return to notes over time and improve them. Enrich them with more context, details, and depth of consideration.

One way to bring Really Good Notes to life is to present them in the open for others to contribute. We often write our notes in isolation. We hide them away on our hard drives and in our notebooks where they are left to rot on the vine.

When we expose our notes to others and make a safe and collaborative environment to work together, the notes flourish and we all become smarter and gain benefits from our differing world views.

By sharing our notes with the world people that have invested in different specialties than our own can dive in and enhance the foundation we have helped to build.

Like the cathedral builders of old, Really Good Notes are built brick by brick.

Sometimes notes are just pretty good. Sometimes they are just "OK". There aren't a lot of bad notes floating around, just discarded notes.

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I plan to fill this page in with examples and thoughts on the nature of Really Good Notes. It's a work in progress!

If you have any thoughts, please email me or DM me on Twitter.