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I mentioned before that I like my tools to be as simple as they can possible be. Another example of this is my notebook.

I love Field Notes notebooks. They are simple, lightweight and provide exactly what I need.

Here’s one of my Field Notes, together with my Embassy Pen

Now, you might think that being a geek and a computer security guy I would not use a paper notebook. That was true a few years ago, however I’ve found it works better for me when I write down my ideas, notes, tips and other snippets of information on an actual sheet of paper.

Writing it on paper allows for a much better way of transferring your thoughts into your notes. You can sketch things on the go, you can add side notations, little marks, etc. For example, this is an example of a sketch I draw after a recon I performed for a physical penetration test.

There is plenty of good software out there that can help you with note taking (like Notational Velocity and Simplenote), however I still prefer the feeling and the power of having written notes; besides, all personal notes should be handwritten.

I switch between programming languages quite a bit; I often wondered what happens when having to deal with the different syntaxes, does the syntax allow you to be more expressive or faster at coding in one language or another. I dont really know about that; but what I do know what keys are pressed when writing with different programming languages. 

This might be something interesting for people who are deciding to select a programming language might look into, here is a post on the answer to the aged question of: Which programming language should I learn?

As far as I can tell languages with a wider focused spread across the keyboard are usually syntaxes we usually associate with ugly languages (ugly to read and code). ex. shell and perl.

You might argue that the variables names being used will alter the results, but as most languages programming have conventions for naming but we can assume a decent spread for variable names. I don’t offer conclusions, just poorly layout the facts. Although the heat map does miss out on things like shift and caps. ex. in perl with the dollar sign. ($)

Whitespace hasn’t been taken into consideration (tabs and spaces) which would have been a cool thing to see. 

The data that was used to gather this information was spread amongst various popular Github projects. 

Lisp code here was written by Paul Graham.

1. heatmap.js http://www.patrick-wied.at/projects/heatmap-keyboard/