_useful

I often create a directory/file called _useful/_useful.org/_useful.txt. I have one in my Dropbox, for example, that contains:

1. My apartment lease
2. My car/motorcycle insurance details
3. A textfile with my vehicle plate numbers/VINs/insurance policy numbers.

At work, I have one with

1. the top visited links for logs/metrics/admin interfaces for the services I work with most
2. a list of links of “typical” or “exemplar” things
   • links to our internal tool views for typical payments, merchants, etc
   • typical size (in bytes) of various protobuf messages we use a lot, size of 1M messages, #messages in 1MB/GB
3. common coding idioms, like several variants of @RunWith that we use in various cases in our test code.
4. useful commands for doing stuff (curl/SQL/plain old shell)

Plain text is great for all the reasons it usually is. But it’s especially useful here (see what I did there?) because the file loads much faster than Google Docs or wiki pages, it’s grep-able, it’s trivial to copy to a new machine, there’s no fuss about futzing with the document to get it to format properly, and soforth.

The naming convention is useful because it naturally gets lexigraphically sorted at the top in most macOS/iOS file lists without being a special character on the shell prompt (which complicates the aforementioned grep-ability.)