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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?

#31

Post by jammycakes »

I started keeping a comprehensive developer diary (I actually refer to it as lab notes) back in December, and it's made a considerable difference to how I think about what I'm coding.

The way I write it is similar to test-driven development — I write down each step in what I'm doing before I do it. When I run a command, I copy the command itself into my notes, then once it's run I copy the important parts of the output (e.g. any error messages).

It really comes into its own when I want to pick up on a task that I had put to one side a few days previously, or when I run into a problem that I think I'd encountered before. It also makes it much easier to avoid the trap of trying the same thing several times before you realise that you're going round and round in circles.

It's also useful for writing documentation. You can just copy and paste what you've written in your lab notes into your commit summaries, Jira tickets, e-mails, spec, help files, whatever, then tidy up as appropriate.

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

#32

Post by allover »

SFJulie wrote: post #9

I keep a diary: with following info day : arriving : departure : time of lunch // travel time. Why ? I noticed after 43h in a moving window of 5 days my focus, irritability is up to the roof and I make way too much mistakes that can lead to a dramatic mistake. My work contract is 37.5 so everytime I reach too much overhead I talk to my manager ask him if he will need me one day to make extra efforts in case of emerge…

Sounds like you've mentally set up an adversarial relationship between yourself and 'them' (managers). This is only going to continue to drain you.

Ideally, look for a job with a smaller commute or better attitude to remote work, and get out now. If you can't do that and need to stay in this job for a while, think about changing your mindset to empathise with your managers, even if you dislike them. Be helpful, think about what they are 'actually trying to achieve', which might not necessarily be what they asked for. Remember this is only a stepping stone til your next, better job.

If you're never going to like working 8-10 hours a day you need to figure out the necessary stepping stones to move into working for yourself.

But whatever you do, don't spend years in a me-vs-them mental battle with management at your current role. I made this mistake and deeply regret the lost years (though I did teach myself JavaScript in that time so now I'm massively employable, fuck that employer, har).

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

#33

Post by ams6110 »

kabdib wrote: post #19

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 inst…

Have you tried org-mode? I would assume you have, as an emacs user, but it can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it. It gives you things like timestamped entries, agenda lists, etc.

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

#35

Post by joepvd »

gkya wrote: post #15

I don't have any such experience but, shouldn't the VCS log serve that purpose? Maybe in conjunction with a NOTES file?

There are different targets for notes in VCS and personal notes. In VerySpecificBug759 you do not want to read about how to get the code to build at all. The context of discovery has a lot of (necessary!) detours, cul-de-sacs, and mis-interpretations.

The context of discovery is often not relevant for the context of fix.

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

#36

Post by joepvd »

jammycakes wrote: post #31

I started keeping a comprehensive developer diary (I actually refer to it as lab notes) back in December, and it's made a considerable difference to how I think about what I'm coding. The way I write it is similar to test-driven development — I write down each step in what I'm doing before I do it. When I run a command, I copy the command itself into my notes, then once it's run I copy the important parts of the outp…

Is there a reason why you made the structure of the notes depend on time? Aren't notes that are about the same topic getting very far apart from each other?

I think searching works well when you are as month or maybe three into the project. How does this work like after five years?

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

#39

Post by aldanor »

samuell wrote: post #23

I researched basically all the solutions (wikis, tiddlywiki, evernote etc etc), but they all had some limitation either in offline access, shareability, portability, openness or something else. What finally made it into a working solution is writing plain markdown files, one per day, automatically synced to bitbucket via tiny bash scripts that initiate a new file for the day (aliased to 'j' for minimal hurdle to star…

The latest TiddlyWiki is actually pretty good for this. I remember using it about a decade ago -- and I've recently started using it for various dev-related stuff, e.g. documenting how to configure this or that; it's surprisingly nice.

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

#40

Post by llccbb »

jammycakes wrote: post #31

I started keeping a comprehensive developer diary (I actually refer to it as lab notes) back in December, and it's made a considerable difference to how I think about what I'm coding. The way I write it is similar to test-driven development — I write down each step in what I'm doing before I do it. When I run a command, I copy the command itself into my notes, then once it's run I copy the important parts of the outp…

Have you every considered using Jupyter Notebooks[0] or is the execution of code not so important?

[0]http://jupyter.org/

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