The Practice of Keeping a Dev Journal

The easiest way to find good documentation is to write good documentation. That goes for basically anything, and in this case it’s your development endeavors through the week, or the sprint. This is what mostly works for me, but definitely take any ideas you like or can think of from my example, and make it work for you, how you want it.

This is my template, and where I keep notes during the sprint:

SUMMARY FOR THE SPRINT, PERSONAL RETRO

  • things that stick out about this sprint or something recently
  • lingering questions or observations
  • any other points to record, feelings, external events, etc.

INTERESTING THINGS TO DO

  • interesting thing 1

DETAILED NOTES

  • detailed notes, or link to the notes

REMINDERS

  • anything that you want to see constantly, about anything
  • make sure to get up and move around!
  • pay attention to slack channel X this sprint!
  • take your dog to the park, and get a short walk in sometime

TAGS

  • these are here for convenience to copy them into the below days

project1 project2

Tuesday - day 10

  • (notes for the day)

another day or the other one…

  • (notes for the day)

Friday - day 3

  • (notes for the day)

Thursday - day 2

  • (notes for the day)
  • any other thing i just wanna write somewhere about something

Wednesday - day 1

  • general thing about this particular first day of sprint
  • something else to remember, or to ask someone today or tomorrow

project1

  • [x] hit up so-and-so about PR review, or to pair program
  • [] make the change requests on other PR

project2

  • [x] hit up so-and-so about PR review, or to pair program
  • [] make the change requests on other PR
// important code snippet

type Response struct {
    Data DataStruct
    sentAt string
}

func getData(params string) (Response, error) {
    data, err := fetchData(params)
    if err != nil {
        return nil, err
    }

    return data, nil
}

How to Use This Template

Hopefully, the template is simple enough to grok it after a minute. It’s definitely a simple setup, but you still have TOTAL freedom to keep your notes how you want them.

Other points:

  • Operating from the vantage point of this template, and looking out and down onto your sprint in forward and in backward view makes the sprint feel simpler. The swirl of to-do lists and things to remember isn’t as much of a maelstrom when you can capture and outline it all in this simple fashion.
  • Checking in frequently on these notes, maybe every hour or so, helps me to feel like I’m on track with my tasks and with my time. You definitely do not need to stick to that if every few hours or so works for you.
  • If things come up and disturb plans, I record those too for the day, above the projects. This is a huge force in stress management when you see that the two or three “small” tasks you had planned to do went undone.
  • If/When tasks go incomplete for a day, I either move the task to the new day OR I copy it into the new day and hope to change the [] into [x].

It’s Platform Agnostic

I’ve tried out Evernote way back, then switched up to using Notion. I do really like Notion for many reasons, but there are enough small things that have motivated me to try out Standard Notes too. You can implement this notes template on any other platform, and it would serve you just as well.

Update: Standard Notes was okay, I did like some of the options like note types and different color themes. But the inability to link to other notes ended up being a fatal flaw to my note taking, so back to Notion it is.

Update: I now just use Obsidian, there are zero connectivity issues as the app writes to local files. Markdown rendered on the fly is 🤌🏽

Other Benefits

Keeping notes like this is a great way:

  • NOT to feel overwhelmed by the bits and pieces of things you think you’ll remember or be able to keep in the front of your head. You will begin to default to switching over to your notes as soon as you start planning, listening, or figuring out what your next move is.
  • NOT to miss the forest for the trees, you get a good 10,000 ft view of the day, and a great 30,000 ft view of the sprint.
  • you’ll have a searchable chronology of what you’ve been up to. Your memory of things done and to be done will be improved by the simple act of writing and condensing and summarizing the important points in your notes.

Happy note taking!