================ Re: Journaling ================ About a week ago sysdharma wrote a post about journaling [0]_. I've summarized [1]_ my journaling activities a few years ago, and still journaling actively, but it is an interesting question how one develops such a habit. I remember being rather forced to keep notes on some projects because the details were important, hard to remember, and a text file seemed most appropriate for them: for instance, it was the case with software reverse engineering, writing down various addresses, "mapping" the program. Same happens with network protocols still, although perhaps those things are closer to documentation drafts. Then there were (well, still are) IM chats during work, into which one may write more than bare minimum needed for coordination: decisions can be documented and discussed that way, and then the log served as a messy journal. For a while I used to write much more than just "done" into issue tracking system tickets, also documenting decisions and everything relevant. Though those systems were mostly awful and information was getting lost on each BTS switch. I think that led me to the current work journal, which is an Org mode TODO list (although I also rely on my mailbox and on commit messages for finding out what/why/when happened in the past). It basically serves as a simple local issue tracker (though the larger documentation drafts I still write separately, and then turn them into documentation). It seems nearly impossible to manage everything (and not to forget about less pressing tasks) without that. I keep thinking that it may be useful to make that journal a part of the documentation, and to keep it in the repository with regular documentation. Though then it would be pretty close to lightweight issue tracking systems that live in source code repositories, such as bugseverywhere, and maybe could try to use those at once. But a shared journal should be composed more carefully, and that would be additional overhead. Probably it would be more useful in settings where multiple people work on the same project(s). In addition to the work journal for multiple projects, I tend to keep individual project development journals for some of the hobby projects: writing down ideas, plans, possibly some links to relevant documentation, standards, and so on. Sometimes I think it would be nice to publish them along with projects, but as mentioned above, it's hard to share messy notes, and I guess it would be hard to keep writing those quick and messy ones if they were intended for sharing. Perhaps a nicer approach is to occasionally digest them into documentation. ---- .. [0] gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/sysdharma/phlog/2019.10.22 .. [1] https://thunix.net/~defanor/notes/journaling.xhtml :Date: 2019-10-30