Where you write down thoughts/what you did/next steps. I use text files, but it's a little hard to look back on afterwards in a cohesive way. I'm wondering if people use other ways?
Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
1–10 of 12 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#2Text files and grep to look back. Then when a project starts to have some longevity I skim through the notes and make more formal documentation of some aspects of the work I'm doing.
I think I'll always stay with simple text files for projects that may or may not go anywhere.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#3Plain text files are a great way to go. You should check out JRNL, https://maebert.github.io/jrnl/. It uses a single file and allows encryption and basically provides easy simple command line support for adding time-dated entries.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#4After a lot of fiddling with different options
I use Vimwiki running in separate Vim instance
on dedicated virtual screen.
Hit ^6, hit enter, hit F4 to put the timestamp, write. Done.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#5Your git commit logs... Because what you actually accomplished is all that really matters.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#6I recorded a brief screencast of how I keep a dev journal. :) https://youtu.be/4W8i8FTz_ck
Hope it's helpful!
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#7Evernote?
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#8github seems like good option.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#9Your git commit logs... Because what you actually accomplished is all that really matters.
I'm not entirely sure why this was downvoted. I think this is a more than reasonable way of keeping track. And honestly, with git commit messages you can even keep track of the things you want to do next.
Re: Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?
#10Your git commit logs... Because what you actually accomplished is all that really matters.
I disagree, I keep just about everything. Obviously the git is /the/ log for the code itself. But there's more to a project than code. I routinely take screenshots and just dump them into a "art dump" folder. It is nice to look back at ideas and features that went away, maybe for a "behind the scenes" look.
Git also doesn't keep ideas, brainstorm and discussion about them. I use Trello for this but it's just personal. But it lets you easily file things as "maybe some day" and "actually doing/done".