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Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?

#14

Post by 5_minutes »

I've been thinking about a little app to keep "logs" about the sites I am working on. Something that lives in the menu bar, and pops up with a short key. A litle pull down to select the project, so I can quickly dump the changelog, and automatic time stamp to the entry. All this in markdown.

I can't believe nobody made this already!

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?

#16

Post by Arun2009 »

I keep a private blog for my side-project, with key links and resources in pages specifically set for them. For example, I might have a page on market research with links to posts on specific topics. But probably I should be more systematic about it, since a lot of my documentation related to the project is also in miscellaneous text files (committed in the /doc folder of the project), and also a few Google docs (for sharing with others).

I find it really handy to figure out how your thought process about the project has grown over time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?

#17

Post by drakonka »

I used to keep a very active dev blog, with near-daily posts about what I did/learned each day in my game dev projects. However, that was when I was freelancing and had a lot of time to spend on personal projects daily. So there was a lot to talk about and so much new activity each day that the posts really helped organize my thoughts and hammer in what I had just learned - it was in practice a public developer diary.

After I moved to a full time role in my chosen industry, I had less time to focus on personal projects and less motivation to keep blogging regularly. I try to keep up with it but blog posts are few and far between now so I would no longer call it a diary.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?

#18

Post by domk »

I use org-mode in Emacs to keep daily notes, with the majority in one big file with an entry per day. The content is quite diverse - a mix of TODOs for the day (especially when I need to get through multiple smaller things that day), things to do or think about later, small notes to self about the code I'm working on, and sometimes quite extensive notes when thinking through the design/architecture of something new.

The last technique especially helps me a lot. When thinking through a hard problem, type out your thoughts in a semi-structured way, never deleting anything. Makes it easier to deal with problems that can be too large to hold in your head at once, to think about the aspects of something step by step, or to retrace your thought process and see why you made certain decisions earlier and maybe explore a different route when you get stuck. When finished, it can be used as a foundation for a design doc I share with the rest of the team.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?

#19

Post by kabdib »

Keeping a diary is pivotal to how I work. I used to write things down in notebooks, but you can't grep dead trees, especially handwritten ones. So I keep a simple flat text file with a new timestamp every day, and nearly everything I do makes it into this file, at some level. I can answer all kinds of questions, from when someone joined or left a team, to how I installed that driver last year, to which servers I installed three years ago and the problems I encountered configuring them. Pretty much anything unusual, or middlin' difficult, or just thoughts on engineering problems. It's candid, I swear and call things as I see them. These notes are an extension of my brain.

I start the day with:

    % note (which just runs Emacs on my notesfile)
and

    M-x new-day
which just appends the current date to the file and positions the cursor, all ready for typing. Dirt simple.

I used to have macros and whatnot for carrying forward lists of TODO items and important tasks, but that was overkill and keeping things simple seems to be the key to success. Likewise, apps like OneNote and so forth just got in the way and wanted to own a piece of me.

Re: Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?

#20

Post by Bilters »

smoyer wrote: post #10

I use the Bullet Journal [0] method (with ink on paper) for all my personal and professional journaling. One notebook per year is about perfect. The only thing missing is aggregation (across years) and search - but I'm working on those "features". [0] http://bulletjournal.com/

I just browsed over their site, and I found it a very interesting concept. Thanks for the tip!
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