Keeping a development journal

Warner Onstine — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 11:58:00 -0700

At last night’s presentation by Ted Neward one of the things he suggested during his debugging talk was to start keeping a development journal. This way you have a written record of things you’ve learned, tried, techniques, ideas, etc.

I like this idea for a number of reasons. I’ve always kept notes of meetings that I’ve been to or of ideas that I’ve had, but I’ve never done one specifically for development (at least at work). I also like the idea of a timeline, where I can go back through my journal and see what I was doing at a particular time, showing me the continuity of my development thought process. It also gives me the ability to track down items that I know happened during a particular time - “How did I end up tracking down that bug with accounting lines again?”

One of the problems I’ve always had is in seperating my personal projects from work projects (and personal projects from each other). I think that this approach, while on the surface looks good, is a bad idea. I periodically have gone through house cleaning and found several partially-filled notebooks of projects I’d started to think about but never implemented, but that had good ideas in them. So what do I do with those? They are in separate notebooks so I can’t combine them. What happens generally is I rip out the pages and recycle the notebooks, but I always end up with more partially-filled out notebooks.

I’ve also started using this blog as my own dev journal, but I don’t/can’t put everything up here (especially for all the work stuff I do as its mostly boring ;-). I like to filter the stuff in my head (a bit) before posting it here. Starting today then I’m going to pick up a Moleskine and start my own dev journal with everything in it including work stuff. Then when that gets filled up I’ll start another. I don’t know how far to separate stuff yet (as I have other things besides development I’m interested in), I think I’ll get two journals, one for software and one for “other creative stuff”.

If you don’t like Moleskines you can always go for a lab notebook (the ones with the fake marble cover) as these have a sturdy cover that will last for a while and you can write the dates on the front cover (sorry couldn’t find a reliable link to these but you can find them in any office supply store).

If you’ve tried doing a development journal, what’s worked for you? what hasn’t?

BlackBox : Tag journal

Keeping a development journal