Mind Mapping
I’ve been playing with mind mapping recently as a way of organizing my thinking on sometimes very broad subjects. As an example I’ve uploaded a Software Engineering mind map to Mindmeister.com.
This mindmap is partly a way of remembering the various technologies that I’ve worked with or know about, and partly a todo list of technologies that I’d like to look at.
I was going to create two maps where I would migrate items from one map to the other as I learned about them, but in truth that would be pointless. If you haven’t used a technology in the last few months, it will be as good as new to you should you try to use it again.
With that in mind I would need to constantly review the “things I know” map, to move items back to the “things I’d like to know” map.
Something I would like to do is split this map into 4 or 5 maps, one representing each of the major branches. It’s getting a bit unwieldy at the moment. If I do that I would need simple drill down and up linking between the maps.
The greatest benefit for me right now is that when I hear about a new product or technology, I can access the map from any machine and add a reminder to myself to look into it in the future, and by adding it to the appropriate place on the map, it will be there should I ever need to use something in that space.
For example, at DDD South West I was introduced to NCrunch. So, NCrunch gets added to the map in the Testing area. Now, whenever I glance at the testing area of the Map, NCrunch is there, along with all the other related tools.