🔗 Why You Should Bookmark Links

Welcome to the eighth issue of the Software Mastery newsletter.

In this issue, I want to talk about bookmarking links.

Over the past year, I’ve become informally known as the person to go to when you need a link to something because I almost always have it.

The thing about having links is it’s not really about memory. Links are long and ugly, so the only practical way to retrieve them is to bookmark them.

When Should I Bookmark Something?

Usually, as I’m working on certain tasks, I come across resources that could be useful in the future.

For example, I might find an internal wiki page that contains a solution to a problem I have or explains a concept more intuitively than the official documentation does.

To determine whether I should bookmark something, I base my decision on two factors:

1. How long did it take me to find this resource? Some resources are the top search result of a common query, so they’re easy to find in the future; other resources are like buried treasure, found after a long journey.

2. How likely will I, or someone else, need this resource in the future? If you’re certain you’ll only need something once, it might not be worth bookmarking. For resources that you keep coming back to, retrieval should be fast.

How Do I Keep Things Organized?

Making a conscious effort to bookmark useful links is half the battle. The other half is figuring out a way to organize them so you can retrieve them later.

For links I intend to bookmark, I organize them in folders based on a team/service.

At Amazon, teams are encouraged to follow a service-based model; to get non-trivial things done, you often need to integrate with multiple services across the company.

For every team/service that my team needs to interact with, I maintain the following bookmarks, at a minimum:

1. A link to the team/service’s wiki.

2. A link to the service’s operational dashboard, if available.

3. A link to my team’s onboarding request for this particular service.

Besides those three, I create additional bookmarks for links I struggle to retrieve over time.

Nowadays, in a world where you can search across all your bookmarks in most browsers, I wouldn’t recommend spending much time thinking about bookmark organization.

You can even maintain a flat hierarchy of bookmarks if you describe them well enough to retrieve them later through search.

Your Turn!

I hope this issue inspired you to start bookmarking useful links you come across in your work or studies.

Ideally, these bookmarks should be published and maintained in a team wiki to maximize knowledge sharing.

Did you find this newsletter useful? Reply to this email or comment on this post to let me know!

Thanks for reading!

Sammy