Not a solution for all of your problems, but it does help me with debugging stuff faster: I have a directory on the desktop called "scratchpad" in which every day I create a new txt file.
During the day I copy-paste every JIRA link I work on there, related class names, APIs, fragments of code I worked on that were particularly tricky, test cases, stacktraces I encountered, useful SQLs, urls to webpages with solutions to problems I had, short descriptions of these problems and my discoveries about them. It's not very verbose, usually it's less than 1 screen worth of notes per day (excluding the stacktraces ;)).
At the end of the work day I save that file as date_short_description.txt - for example 20241121_exception_when_logging.txt.
When I encounter a problem giving me dejavu - the first thing I do is grep in that folder for exceptions, lines in stacktrace, class names, related keywords, etc.
After a few years working at the same company it's surprisingly helpful. I started doing this at my first job after working there for over 2 years and experiencing the "I could swear I dealt with this problem before, but can't rememeber how".
Another tip that is probably personal is - I tend to fall into this habit of "do a very small change, compile, check tests" loop that feels good but is suboptimal if testing/compiling takes a long time. So I try to notice if I fall into that trap and stop myself. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's wasting time (and giving me an excuse to procrastinate cause "it's compiling").
During the day I copy-paste every JIRA link I work on there, related class names, APIs, fragments of code I worked on that were particularly tricky, test cases, stacktraces I encountered, useful SQLs, urls to webpages with solutions to problems I had, short descriptions of these problems and my discoveries about them. It's not very verbose, usually it's less than 1 screen worth of notes per day (excluding the stacktraces ;)).
At the end of the work day I save that file as date_short_description.txt - for example 20241121_exception_when_logging.txt.
When I encounter a problem giving me dejavu - the first thing I do is grep in that folder for exceptions, lines in stacktrace, class names, related keywords, etc.
After a few years working at the same company it's surprisingly helpful. I started doing this at my first job after working there for over 2 years and experiencing the "I could swear I dealt with this problem before, but can't rememeber how".
Another tip that is probably personal is - I tend to fall into this habit of "do a very small change, compile, check tests" loop that feels good but is suboptimal if testing/compiling takes a long time. So I try to notice if I fall into that trap and stop myself. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it's wasting time (and giving me an excuse to procrastinate cause "it's compiling").