What Ada Lovelace's notes teach teams about writing things down
2026-10-13 · The Scrums team
Today is Ada Lovelace Day. The work she's remembered for was a set of notes on someone else's paper, about three times as long as the paper itself. Teams could learn from that.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, held on the second Tuesday of October to celebrate women in science, technology, engineering and maths.
In 1843, Lovelace translated an Italian engineer's paper about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer that was never built. She added her own notes to the translation, lettered A to G. By most accounts they ran to about three times the length of the paper. Note G set out a method for the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, often called the first published computer program.
The paper was a summary of a lecture. The notes were what she'd worked out, written down so others could build on it. They're why we remember her.
What teams lose when they don't write things down
Most team decisions happen in meetings and chat. A week later, nobody's sure what was agreed, why, or who said they'd do it. New joiners learn by asking the same questions again. The knowledge was there; it was just never written down where people could find it.
Pages in Scrums
Scrums has a place for that writing, next to the meetings where the decisions are made:
- Write together, live. Everyone on a page edits at once, with each other's cursors showing, and changes merge rather than overwrite. Type
/ for headings, lists, tables, toggles, code, images and files. - Discuss in the margin. Comments attach to the words they're about, and stay attached as the text around them changes.
- Every meeting leaves notes. When a retro, poker session or health check ends, its summary is saved as a page the team can read and edit.
- Track things in a table. Database pages hold rows with typed columns, such as status, dates and tags, with sorting, filtering and CSV import and export.
- Find it later. Search finds pages by their titles and by what's written in them.
Pages: written together, kept beside the meetings.
Pages are private to whoever writes them until they're shared with people, a team or a whole organization, as an editor, a commenter or a viewer.
Lovelace's notes have outlasted the engine they described by nearly two centuries. Your team's notes only need to outlast the next reorganization. Sign up and start writing them down.
More on team docs in Scrums.