If you’re like me, even though you code daily - you can hardly remember how to program anymore. I don’t know the language I use daily (more than any other) - Python - very well at all. I can’t even remember HTML, and I’ve been writing it for 15 years.

And yet I don’t think I’m a blathering idiot (for this shortcoming, anyway). Like most everyone else - I don’t much program anymore. Rather, I piece together other people’s code exclusively - adapting it to my needs. Put another way, my memory has become externalized. Sites like Stack Overflow, handily indexed by Google, are there to help me remember any basic operation, and many complex operations.

The upside: I am ‘fluent’ in a dozen languages. Isolated from the internet, I can’t remember any of them, but I can code at a pretty good rate in any of them thanks to the web.

But there’s an artifact of this system, and its been going to waste. At the end of any program I’m editing - when the file(s) do what I need them to do, there is a browser window with an ordered list of each problem I encountered, and the solution to it. And generally, this goes away when I close all the tabs.

So from now on, I’m using OneTab, a Chrome Plugin, to persist these tabs as comments in a README. I figure it will make the code I write self documenting.