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I'm almost finishing up my university education as an engineer, and I've learned so so so many skills the last two years mostly (first two years in uni were the most useless in my life), including programming, circuits and systems design, practical mathematical methods, and the list goes on.

However I'm just a human, and I live and let forget, or however you say this :p So my question is directed to people who had many years of experience working, and had to deal with many projects that requires multiple skills. Do you keep references to review how to do something? Or is it just YOLO and google it? Because I'm sure no one can memorize everything concerning how to do things! I'm suffering from it, and I think it's similar for software developers.

How should I go with managing my skills? How do I avoid losing them with time? And what is the best way to get back to them after a time of not using them? (I'm talking mental skills not physical skills of course)
Smart question. My approach to this is more about mitigation than problem solving. I agree that your body works against you at time (or more). Your main problem is poor unmanaged human memory. The sad part is that your brain isn't controlled by your consciousness. Countless times I wish I had a switch in my brain to instruct it to set my memory on high priority when doing or learning important stuff. So far, wishing didn't help me evolve my brain, but few practices helped me mitigate the problem. I am talking about taking notes. I have been doing this for years and with time I learned to make this process more effective, efficient and pragmatic. I still have notes since I was ten years old.
The faintest ink beats the strongest memory.
The following points I am glad to share with you:

- I do understand that this might be tedious and time consuming especially in this fast pace century, but discipline yourself and accept that you need to lose those few minutes taking notes for the sake of the future.
- Have you database of personal notes well organized, easy to access and close to your point of reach at any time (and I mean anytime). Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with some idea in my head and I write it on my android app (Color Note). I used to take notes on paper but I gave up on that because you cannot carry this with you all the time and more importantly it is mostly impossible to index data on an ever growing notebook.
- My main notes database is a folder on my pc with all my observations, conclusions, important projects ... I do have a one large note file for programming tricks and practices I learned. I decided to keep this in one file for easy access and faster search, and please if you do this, do tag any new input.(using any characters you like) This is a great approach to achieve a manual human indexing. Ex:
-Javascript anonymous function #javascript:
(function func(){alert(1);})()

I wish I can debug my brain, correct some glitches and make my aging memory young again. Sadly I cannot but I am always researching the problem of aging memory.

Even though I am sure I haven't done this problem any justice by keeping this short, I do hope I did convince you to start this good habit.
Skills are about practice. The things you're not going to practice, you're going to forget and there's nothing you can do about that.

Now here's the upside:
  • You're young and at the beginning of your engineering career. You think you know a lot of things. You don't. You know nothing. There's a lot more to know.
  • As time goes, you will start knowing A LOT about one very specific topic. It's called specializing and it's a great thing.
  • With time, you'll realize that all these years weren't about teaching you stuff. It was about teaching you how to learn stuff. You know how to learn on your own. If you ever need anything, you'll know how to figure out on your own. Discardable knowledge is a great thing. It frees up your limited mind to concentrate on long-lasting knowledge.
Here's a practical example:

I graduated from engineering school 6 years ago. Even though I did advanced maths and physics back in the days, if I had to write a physics game today, I would google Newton's laws and equations. I don't need to remember them. I just trust myself to figure them out if I ever needed them. However talk to me about Unix, Python, virtualization or the plethora of technologies I deal with daily, and I'm much more comfortable. 6 years of work made me specialize in a subset of all the stuff I learned at school.

And this is just the beginning...
Thank you so much! The answers are even better than I expected they could be!

You got me spot on, both of you, and talked about things that I am missing. I guess I'm lost because I never take notes, and I rarely practice what I learn, it's just the way that I learn new things. I mostly do a lot of reading, and that's clearly not enough; but there's so much things I need to learn about, I have no time to practice everything or take notes and put them in good format.

I think I'll have to wait until I'm actually working in my specialization domain, and then I'll spend most of my time on practicing and "documenting" the task I have to do.
ILIA_93 wroteI'm almost finishing up my university education as an engineer, and I've learned so so so many skills the last two years mostly (first two years in uni were the most useless in my life)
Well you paid your dues to the superficial (not to say something else) people who will judge you based on your CV when you apply for work, so useless, no sure