================
 Re: Journaling
================

About a week ago sysdharma wrote a post about journaling_. I've
summarized_ 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.


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.. _journaling: gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/sysdharma/phlog/2019.10.22
.. _summarized: https://defanor.uberspace.net/notes/journaling.xhtml

:Date: 2019-10-30