Writing Development Journals

I have often wondered why spend such effort writing detailed documentation to wiki page when the read count barely exceeds 10. Eventually, I realized that I mostly read documents that can be sorted in chronological order such as Change Logs, Git, and chat messages.

In this, article I describe a convention of writing development journals, and maintaining chronological order of the information. By maintaining a journal, your colleagues can easily see what have been done during your time off.

Format of the Journal

The format is a simple date journal with bullet points, some special rules apply for e.g. meetings and e-mail messages. The goal is to keep the journal compact and omitting unnecessary details such as clock times.

Tags

Tags are used to keep the records compact, e.g. instead of writing "We received an e-mail", we can write [email].

Emails

The content of the emails should always be summarized.

It is especially important to make sure that if there is something that needs an action, its completion is logged.

Meetings

For meetings, do not just transcribe it but find the key points and continuity. Nowadays, you can use AI agents to do the heavy-lifting and even summarize it for you!