How I Keep Notes About My Laravel Projects: scratch.md
Sep 2017
In my day to day work, I find myself jotting things down about the project I'm working on constantly. Points I need to make at an upcoming meeting, a plan for completing a task, a list of areas of technical debt in the app.
I end up with notes scattered between pieces of paper on my desk, Evernote, Bear, Wunderlist, you name it.
Although I think Wunderlist and Bear are awesome, I needed a place to hold more fleeting thoughts about my specific Laravel projects. Here's what I came up with:
/scratch.md
via GIPHY
It's simple, create a `scratch.md` file in your project's root, just like you do for `README.md`. Now you have a place to throw down thoughts, notes, todos, ideas, etc... I consider it a waiting room. I start by jotting things in my `scratch.md` file, then I either delete it when I no longer need it or move it to something more permanent/appropriate like Bear, Wunderlist, Jira, email?
### But what about version control?
Because these notes are personal and don't belong in a repository, we need to `gitignore` them. The easiest thing to do is add it to your project's `.gitignore` file. Doing this for every project would get old - turns out you can ignore files in git globally.
1. Create a file at: `~/.gitignore_global`
2. Add `scratch.md` to the first line
3. Run: `git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global`
There ya go, now you can scratch away in your new `scratch.md` file. Enjoy!
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