When doing development you often run into problems that you have to spend a great deal of time figuring out the solutions to. Generally that’s because the problem isn’t common enough to have a lot of documentation or its so common other people don’t post about it.

These problems also have a tendency to crop back up, but after you’ve forgotten how you solved the problem. The solution is of course to write something down.

I’ve come up with a system that is serving me well. When I have one of these problems I create a new note in my Development notebook in Evernote. It immediately gets three headings added: Problem, Context, and Solution.

The Problem is what you encountered you have to find a solution to.

The Context is what environment or circumstance is the problem in. For instance is it with Magento or iOS?

The Solution is how you solved the problem.

Once I started doing this, I decided I’d start blogging my answers. Those previous Problem/Solutions can be found on my personal blog. From now on they will be here on the Reactuate Software Blog.