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This blog is all about your personal notes in Confluence. If you document your personal notes on Confluence you can improve the documentation, be organized well and be able to share your personal notes easily.

• Why should I use the Confluence personal space?
• What belongs into the personal space?
• What does not belong into the personal space?
• How do I set up and share my personal space with others?

These are the questions that I will try to answer here. Short answer: Improve your organization of personal notes!
If you don’t use it yet, it will hopefully improve your documentation. If you are already a user of the Confluence personal space you might get some new aspects. And if you already use it please comment, so I can learn from your experience!

The Problem with Personal Notes

I often find myself copying bash snippets from the internal project documentation or the internet. Most likely, I need to adapt some parts of it to fit my needs. And even more likely I need to do this regularly. Naturally I started a .txt document that contained the commands that I needed regularly. I couldn’t move these commands into the project space because these commands contained Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) from my devices, my personal directory setup and similar customizations. However, I also found myself often to copy these commands and send them over to my team collegues. Until that day when one team collegue sent me a link to his personal Confluence space.

Personal Notes in the Confluence Personal Space

The personal space of the team collegue contain a list where he had his own collection of commands. That was the moment I startet to move all my commands to my own Confluence space.

You can even start a free plan for your private personal notes: Confluence Free

My Personal Space

My Confluence personal space at work currently looks like this:

• Nicolas Landing Page
  • Backend Stuff
  • Git Stuff
  • Linux Stuff
  • Microsoft Stuff
  • Project Stuff
  • Testsetup Stuff
• Temp Project Page1
• Temp Project Page2

Note how Confluence will sort these pages automatically if you don’t add a number in front. For me, this is just fine.

Example Page Content

Nicolas Landing Page

My personal space starts with a landing page. On this page I list links that I (currently) often need. I perfer to save the links here as I can also add addtional notes to theses links/sites and organise them in a table. However, I do not save links that all of the team need regulary. I won’t let this page become a project space starting page. That should be in the project documentation.

Backend Stuff

I work as a hard- and firmware developper, so the backend is not my focus area. However, I also find myself look up things in the backend and occasionally need some more specific infos that I store here. Additionally, I can complement the documentation with notes that backend developpers do not need, but help me to understand their area.

Git Stuff / Linux Stuff

As we use git and work on linux I regularly need to look up the commands that I do not need on a daily basis. However, I often need the same or similar commands.

For example I have the command

git fetch -p origin

just to remind me, that from time to time I can clean up my local branches.

Or more complex commands, for example the following to print local branches that are not on the remote

git branch --format "%(refname:short) %(upstream)" | awk '{if (!$2) print $1;}'

that I once found here.

The benefit of having them saved on the Confluence personal space is that I am able to adapt the commands to the personal needs. For example in our repository our squad works on the feature branch squad-xx. I therefore adapted the command to delete local branches that are merged on the remote to automatically inlcude this squad-xx branch but also work on our other repositories with a different main/master branch.

git branch --merged | egrep -v "(^\*|master|main|squad-xx)" | xargs git branch -d

In the field of general linux commands for example, I saved the command to create a virtual python environment with a different python version than the default one. And I also have several prepared grep commands to speed up my search process.

Project Stuff / Testsetup Stuff

The Project Stuff and Testsetup Stuff pages contain commands that I personalised with my directory layout and the Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID) of my devices. This is the page I probably use the most as I just cannot remember the UUIDs.

Temporary Documentation Pages

If I do not know yet where to put a new page or if I am hunting bugs and do not know if it will be benefitial to post the process and findings in the project documentation, I create a new temporary page here. The big advantage is that the page is already correctly formatted if it turns out to be important for the project. Additionally, I can start documenting the bug hunting like a diary and I can easily consult help from my team colleages and share my progress. But thesese pages may only reside temporarily in my Confluence personal space. If they are important for the project, I move them into the project space. Otherwise I delete them afterwards.

Setup, Share and Move the Personal Space

Setup

The setup of the Confluence personal space is straigth forward:

• Choose your profile picture at the right side of the Confluence header
• Select Add Personal Space…
• Hit Create

Now you already have your personal space.

Share

To give access, you can simply:

• Choose Space tools > Permissions from the bottom of the siderbar
• Hit Edit Permissions (enter your password if prompted)
  You should see the confluence-users group listed under Groups. To the left of the list of permissions is the View permission, which determines whether everyone in that group can see your space.
• You can also add individual people

If you want to restrict a specific page, you can do this directly on the page using the lock symbol at the top, next to the navigation bar. However, I do not use restricted pages.

Move

A page can easily be moved, even accross spaces:

• Open desired page
• Select the 3 dots menu at the top right -> Move
• Select the new paren space and page

Conclusion about Personal Notes in Confluence

As you probably could see, I put several notes in the Confluence personal space as an addition to the project space. I think it is important, that the personal space never contains information that other team collegues need regularly. If so, you should most probably move this information into the project space. In contrast, I also do not think that the information like commands prepared for my UUIDs belongs into the project space documentation.

What is your work flow? Where do you store your notes? How do you handle such informations and code snippeds?

Do you prefer *.txt documents, OneNote or Word / LibreOffice documents?

Feel free to comment and share your experience.