George

Future

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Keeping a daily work journal can significantly benefit developers by boosting productivity, aiding in debugging, and providing valuable input for performance reviews. The practice involves documenting tasks, conversations, problems encountered, and priorities for the next day. Tools like Boostnote and VS Code are recommended for maintaining such journals electronically in Markdown format. Proper organization of entries by date can enhance the utility of the journal.

Coding Career Advice: Keeping a Daily Work Journal

Tip #1: Keeping a Daily Work Journal 🔗︎

It is funny how software developers have become the paper pushers we used to have, the only difference being that the in and out boxes are Jira tickets. Creativity is down the drain.
However, I keep track in 3 different ways.
<ol>
<li>
Pure text, copy and paste unstructured everything I need to share, things I need to look up quickly and also things I need to remember temporarily. Text is one dimensional.
</li>
<li>
Confluence pages, I write down anything that needs to be shared over time or that I can send a link to the person who has a question. Not single pages, but multiple dimensions with hyperlinks in between. I document for myself, it forces me to make the code human readable and influences my coding if I cannot.
</li>
<li>
I don’t collect code snippets, I create libraries. It forces me to rethink the code snippets and refactor them so that they fit together as a library. Every time I find a useful piece of code, it becomes part of that library. Again, it forces my creativity and thinking into multiple dimensions.
</li>
</ol>

I might have to try this out. I find myself trying new things, and journalling may help me keep these things organized and be more mindful of what I am doing and why I am doing it.