Keeping a Dev Journal

How many of you track your growth as a developer on a regular basis? I've been doing so for the last nine months, and I've found it rather rewarding. I thought I would write about it and share my experiences.

What's a Dev Journal?

For me, a dev journal is simply a daily record of anything I did that's code-related. Any contributions I accepted, any issues I filed on a project, any bugs I fixed, or any programs I wrote for fun. I don't include work-related coding tasks, although maybe I should.

Why Keep One?

The reason I started using a dev journal was to see if I could discern any patterns in how I work on code - particularly in my mental state. I have a problem when working on code in my spare time: I come up with a lot of ideas, and for the ideas that I choose to work on, I will often get distracted by my latest shiny idea and abandon the one I'm currently working on, leaving a trail of half-completed projects in my wake. This is a pattern I'm hoping to find a solution to, so I figured that tracking my day-to-day coding habits and how I feel about them would help.

So far, I haven't identified the underlying cause on why I jump from idea to idea (let me know if you experience this too, or have in the past!), but keeping a dev journal has had other benefits:

• It's a record of accomplishment that I can feel good about. If I ever need a reminder of cool stuff I've done, I can go looking through my dev journal!
• It encourages me to write better commit messages by fostering a habit of thinking about why I made a change in source code, and also having good commit messages to review when I'm summarizing my day in the journal.
• It provides ideas or material for blog posts; I was able to recount details that would probably have been lost in my MoarVM leak hunt series because of my dev journal.
• It helps me refer back to issues I had in the past so I can arrive at the solution more easily in the future.

Another thing I just started doing (taking a hint from this repository) is to start tracking interesting things I learned that day. You never know when you're going to need to dig that knowledge up!

Do you keep a dev journal? If you already do, or if you want to start keeping one, please let me know what your experience has been!