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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Keeping a Changelog at Work (2020)
schmooser wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
I keep weekly notes in my work Org Roam project, Week-N-of-2024.org,
where I store all the current work. At the end of the week I carry on
TODO/DOING/WAITING headings. Every heading usually references topical
Org Roam notes, so checking backlinks I can trace the work progress.
To keep it public - I tag certain headings with :Priority: tag and then
use Org-QL to find them, pretty-print (enrich with Story links ,
completion date), sort by priority, TODO state etc; then export to HTML
and copy-paste into Confluence.
The trick is to balance between granularity of items. I definitely
donât want to make everything public, but I do want to have
everything in my notes, and this method solved it - the best of all
tried over 15 years.
tpoacher wrote 16 hours 17 min ago:
I do something similar, and in fact have some useful bash scripts to
help me remember to log stuff.
Basically it's a script that pops up a reminder window at regular
intervals, with options for daemonising, and enabling/disabling while
daemonised, and auto-enabled at startup if it's a new day.
Plus, it integrates with a pomodoro timer/logger I've written, such
that all the "tomatoes" (i.e. pomodoro sessions) I've done the day
before automatically get added to the log at the start of a new day.
They're fairly simple scripts, but happy to share if anyone's
interested.
jurakovic wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
I have myself started practising this at the beginning of this year
when I changed job. I have all my notes in git repo as well as a
changelog file. But changelog is more like a timetrack file.
In repo I have also commit.sh script [1] (for which I have also desktop
shortcut) and at the end of work day I simply run it and (after a few
more confirmations) turn of laptop and go home.
[1]
URI [1]: https://gist.github.com/jurakovic/8c0535b3b8fbc96228de1a94ea91...
setheron wrote 23 hours 5 min ago:
I really enjoyed Snippets at Google which was a company wide way to
share your changelog.
There were also some nice integrations to pull in commits, doc edits ,
etc..
kabdib wrote 1 day ago:
i keep a very simple "notes.txt" file and just append to it; i add a
timestamp at the start of every day. literally no other formal
structure
i put nearly everything in it that is interesting. snippets of code,
bits of debugging sessions, notes from meetings, little reminders. it's
a single file that my editor loads in milliseconds and it's very
searchable
i've been doing this for over 35 years (... starting over at each new
company). having a "dump" of knowledge at my fingertips has saved me
hours, many times
lambrospetrou wrote 1 day ago:
I have also written about my "worklog" [1], what I call my own
changelog at work.
It's a simple Markdown file, versioned on my own Gitea instance.
The worklog contains all notes about everything I spend my time at
work. That is project work, meetings, discussions, todos, long-term
todos and investigations, and anything I need to be able to check back
later.
I cannot count the number of times I went back and searched this file
to find information that others forgot, the meeting notes did not
capture, and in general things that I need.
Keeping this kind of log makes performance reviews trivial too. Just
scroll through the worklog for the period you want, copy paste bullet
points, and then spend some time cleaning them up and rewriting them as
necessary.
If anyone does not keep a worklog, start now :)
1.
URI [1]: https://www.lambrospetrou.com/articles/the-worklog-format-1/
gtpedrosa wrote 1 day ago:
I'm keeping a detailed log of my activities in orgmode. But only
because I have to input the hours in another system. It is interesting
that even though the categories summarized are from the
org-clock-table, I write small descriptions on each category for each
day. For instance I might have multiple entries throughout the day for
"Client X - Report", but I summarize what I've actually done in the
notes. At the end of week I export it and archive with the clocktable
along it, using a narrow-subtree. I also paste them in an archived
section with the Year/week so I keep track of the activities and they
are searcheable. So far, the clock tables themselves have been most
valuable to me, especially for review purposes. Still, I believe a brag
document complements this quite well and is something I plan to restart
doing.
wodenokoto wrote 1 day ago:
The article really lacks a discussion on the granularity of this
âchange logâ. Do you write âworked on db projectâ or do you
detail progress and failures?
I keep a daily log at work (not public) and sometimes it just says
âproject 1, project 2â for days on end. Not really useful to look
back at, but still nice to jot down in the morning.
otohp wrote 1 day ago:
This is a great idea. My problem is one of discipline ... to do it
every day. And I dont know if that is a problem that can be solved by
technology.
mrbluecoat wrote 1 day ago:
That's why I like [1] since it records my activities automatically
URI [1]: https://www.timely.com/
wizzwizz4 wrote 1 day ago:
If you know you're not able to do something every day, design a
process that does not require that you do it every day. "Discipline"
is overrated: a way of people blaming themselves for their inability
to solve anticipated problems with in-the-moment, resource-intensive
strategies that nearly everyone is instinctively averse to, and
thereby validating their disinclination to pursue structural
solutions.
anal_reactor wrote 1 day ago:
> Since my first day in AWS, just over a year ago, Iâve been
experimenting with keeping a CHANGELOG of everything I do, available
for everyone at the company to see. I think you should too!
I think this is a great idea for CEOs and those overly eager juniors,
but for everyone else who's not trying to speedrun work burnout any%,
that's the stupidest idea ever. Seriously, what's the goal here?
Suppose everyone in your company does this. The result is that
employees get divided into three camps:
1. Those who don't give a fuck about their jobs and have exactly one
entry per day. For them, their CHANGELOG (don't forget obligatory
capitalization) is basically a document that their manager can pull and
have them fired for low performance, even if the manager was satisfied
with their performance before this metric was introduced.
2. Those who don't give a fuck either, but understand the point above
and don't want to get fired: they'll start filling their day with
useless tasks, just to look busy. There's no added performance, but
management becomes more difficult, because employees are incentivized
to lie to their managers, making communication murky. The majority of
employees fall into this category.
3. A clique of employees turning their CHANGELOG (again, don't forget
the obligatory capitalization of all letters of which the word
consists) into a badge of honour and a competition. There will be one
winner, the rest will feel bad about being bad employees and low
performers, and having this pointed out.
It's basically a diet version of that software that takes a screenshot
of your display every five minutes and sends it to HR. And turns that
into a publicly available graph.
PorterBHall wrote 1 day ago:
I use jrnl (jrnl.sh) to keep a daily work journal. I start every day
writing about the most important things from the day before. My journal
entries are comprised of a headline followed by a short blurb. Itâs
easy to script with jrnl, so I can easily pull out just the headlines
of the last week or year, easy to search for colleagues names, etc.
Comes in handy during annual reviews or researching history of
decisions. And itâs encrypted.
gigatexal wrote 1 day ago:
I have been doing this for years and itâs amazing. It really does
make meetings more useful because I can show people what Iâve done
and they see it and know. Itâs far easier in the moment to put down
the Jira ticket and write a description of what I did or who I helped
or what is broken and the attempts to fix it etc etc.
It helps me organize what Iâm going to do. Who I need to talk to. Etc
etc. this part is outside of the Changelog per se but I also keep a log
for that and I keep a document called reference. Itâs a Knowlege
graph of sorts of all things that I learned about the company over
time.
Examples include: this is how to reload data from this really
convoluted system and the things to watch out for. (This eventually
becomes a confluence doc for everyoneâs benefit)
tra3 wrote 1 day ago:
I send my task list along with notes to chatgpt to summarize, and log
the output. It's easy to go back to the date where I did something and
find detailed notes, based on this generated index. The problem is
dealing with days that are full of interruptions and are basically
completely unplanned. I have trouble tracking these.
xnickb wrote 1 day ago:
I would recommend not using pixelation as means to hide text. It is
easy to reverse.
wutwutwat wrote 1 day ago:
Personally, if I wanted something to not be read by anyone I would
never leave it in the source image and pixel blur it out. That
doesn't make sense. Why leave the original text there at all? Cut the
entire area out so there is no text, and nothing that can be reversed
in that cast. I'd even take it a step further and say that once you
cut the text out, screenshot the image and use that instead of the
edited original, that way even embedded edit/undo/smart os features
can't accidentally leak out the ability to undo to the original.
xnickb wrote 1 day ago:
Funny. I was doing the same guided by some gut feeling, and then
the Pixel vulnerability was published, where people would recover
original images from the images cropped in Pixel album app
cl3misch wrote 1 day ago:
Is it? I hear that thrown around a lot but I doubt it's easy. Maybe
people are confusing it will a swirly filter, which isn't destructive
and can be reversed easily?
I know that there's strong prior knowledge but the pixelation is
destructive so the problem is very ill-posed.
justsomehnguy wrote 1 day ago:
> pixelation is destructive
Yes, but JPEG compression is destructive too yet you can (well,
most of the time) see what it's in the picture.
With pixelation you are essentially replace a clearly readable
character with some yet unknown 'pixel character'. It's even more
pronounced on a fixed-width fonts.
Just try it yourself on the clear shot (not a JPEGed to death one)
first.
mr_mitm wrote 1 day ago:
It's not necessarily easy, but possible in some cases. If you can
can live with a risk of, say, 1% that someone reverses this, fine.
If not, I recommend using black bars.
xnickb wrote 1 day ago:
Fair enough, I haven't tried it myself, just glanced over a piece
of software that does it (HMM) and saw the blogpost.
In reality , though, removing just a bit pf entropy can be of great
value when context is known. With LLMs in mind.
Noghartt wrote 1 day ago:
Kinda related to the theme, but looking for other perspective. Having a
brag document is a really useful way to track those things too:
URI [1]: https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/
shepherdjerred wrote 1 day ago:
I've done something like this for a year or two with a single Markdown
document + Obsidian. I call it my "working set" where I write down my
TODO list. I have a similar document for my personal life when I have a
lot going on or when I'm trying to be particularly productive.
At the end of the day I make an entry for the next day carrying over
what I didn't finish. If something has been carried over for too long
(e.g. something that I'd like to do but isn't required) then I just
remove it. Usually I might have 3-4 tasks each day, though when I first
joined my most recent company my list was something like 10-20 small
tasks for a couple of weeks.
If I have larger investigations I'll always write it down in a separate
Markdown document so that my working set doesn't grow too large.
It's a very low overhead way to do task tracking, and there are all of
the benefits listed in the parent article. I don't think I'd ever make
this publically available though.
quaddo wrote 1 day ago:
I do something somewhat similar which has evolved for myself and in
part for my team. What follows is heavily abridged in the interest of
time.
I use Obsidian as follows:
1. Daily log in bullet-point format. Title in YYYY-MM-DD format.
Bottom of log has [[YYYY-MM-DD]] with tomorrowâs date.
If I get into a task that starts to get a bit âchattyâ and/or
would benefit from capturing stdin/stdout/stderr snippets, Iâll use
the [[blah]] trick and dump it there.
If a particular priority task didnât get tended to, I copy that
into tomorrowâs daily before stepping afk for the day.
Gets shared with manager, etc.
2. Weekly summary using the ![[Week ending YYYY-MM-DD]] embedded view
Obsidian feature in my daily log page. For that at-a-glance warm
fuzzies. This boils down to:
- retrospective
- highs
- lows
- 1:1 notes
- incoming weekâs tasks/priorities
I use this page for my 1:1âs of course. Iâve only very recently
started copying the retrospective to my manager via Slack to ensure
heâs got the goods.
I prep my incoming week with a new weekly summary, and pre-populate
the bare bones for the daily notes.
darthwalsh wrote 1 day ago:
I use the Obsidian Task plugin, so if I had an important, low-urgency
idea at the end of the week instead of rolling it over I will give it
a START or DUE date. Then I use the task query to keep an eye on when
to reconsider or finish things.
This works a lot better for me, instead of copying over more and more
ideas each day, or building a write-only SOMEDAY.md
neilv wrote 1 day ago:
I've done this at some companies, and for some consulting engagements.
The last company where I initially did it, I stopped, because I found
two problems with how I was doing it:
* spending extra time to track this information that was usually
already captured somewhere in a project tracking system; and
* sometimes siloing information, when all the redundant reporting means
that sometimes one place got the information, while another place
didn't (so, sometimes it was only in my separate notes, which weren't
discoverable).
One time I didn't do this was in an early startup, when I was the
entire engineering team. I ran a low-friction GitLab board in a Kanban
variation, for pretty much all work I did. All information was in
GitLab, in one way or another. At our weekly update meetings, I
screenshare the GitLab board, and point at the top (most recent) boxes
in the Done and Abandoned columns (and Active and Blocked), as I
summarize. If anyone wants more info, either then, or at any time in
the future, one can click, and it's there.
One thing that doesn't cover is if I help someone with something
without creating a task for it. If you have a bigger company, and it
cares a lot about performance evaluation, then you might want to have a
convention of mentioning someone who helped, in the comments on a task.
Then a manager can have some report, over the entire task&project
management system, that gives them more insight into how everyone has
been contributing. (Personally I'd prefer to be at a company where no
one has to even think about performance evaluations, because they're
too busy focused on success of the company, but the info is probably
there if anyone wanted it.)
D-Coder wrote 1 day ago:
I do something like this and it's helpful.
I tend to forget about a task once it's in the past, so I just put one
line per task in a text file every day. Sometimes it would be the same
line ("2024.12.21 Worked on xyz feature") for several days in a row,
but at review time, it was easy to see what I'd accomplished.
sunaookami wrote 1 day ago:
I use Obsidian for this, it has a button that quickly creates a daily
note: [1] After a while I review the daily notes and delete or
categorize + summarize them into subfolders (e.g. "Work", "Project
XY", "Feature XY").
URI [1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Daily+notes
makerdiety wrote 1 day ago:
Is not a personal knowledge base like Trilium[0] a simple solution
for storing digitized memories of your life? Rather than being
limited to one lines because of the .txt file format? Paragraphs can
contain more information than one lines, you know.
[0]:
URI [1]: https://github.com/zadam/trilium
rsanek wrote 1 day ago:
in the first scrolls of the README, I see a note about this project
being in maintenance mode and then two huge images about how much
they support Ukraine.
not really what I want to see from a piece of software that's
supposed to store all my knowledge.
wutwutwat wrote 1 day ago:
notepad.exe, gedit, nano, vi, notes.app
boom, a piece of software where you can store all your knowledge.
stop trying to make this political, can we have one friggin place
where folks don't express a political opinion in an attempt to
stir up shit?
this OP is about keeping a changelog at work, how do you do that?
teeray wrote 1 day ago:
I do this myself, but I keep it strictly private. Iâm mindful that
while this record keeping has been very beneficial to me, it could also
be wielded against me in ways I donât anticipate.
esperent wrote 1 day ago:
I guess it depends on what kind of work you do, and perhaps your
personality and career goals too, but if I ever found myself working
in a place where a simple, factual log of the work I have done was
weaponized against me, I'd immediately start looking for a new place
to work.
tpoacher wrote 16 hours 24 min ago:
That's oversimplifying things a bit.
Not OP, but I also keep a private log.
Simply put, different things go in there, compared to a public one;
let alone a public one with intended visibility.
And some of the most useful logs are the most private ones.
Plus, not sure how much I'd trust a person's public logs if I knew
they were made to be both public and publicized. My expectation in
that scenario would be that actions were embellished / inflated
accordingly. Everybody has on and off days, but I'd be very
surprised to see this openly admitted in a public log; after all,
what good could ever come from it?!
I used to go through my daily logs at the end of the week and pick
the most important, non-personal, work-related things that happened
in the week, and add them to a separate weekly log. This I was
happy to open in public in the middle of a conversation if
necessary ... but I would never open my private log in front of
anyone. It's too private.
evnix wrote 1 day ago:
Any kind of work, most sprint reviews are basically: what can we do
better so that we can squeeze more out of you than last sprint.
teeray wrote 1 day ago:
We live in an era where companies are trying to claw back data
(open APIs) that were made public with altruistic intentions and is
now being used in ways they donât like (LLMs). Obviously not
directly applicable hereâno one is training an AI on your logs.
But my personal policy is rooted against oversharing. You canât
use the data in ways I donât anticipate if you simply donât
have the data. If Iâm doing the work to produce that information,
I am going to ensure that it used is entirely to my advantage.
Macha wrote 1 day ago:
I've adopted a practice like this at times, and it definitely helps,
but then there's also those days where it starts with a standup, you
get pulled aside after to help someone wit their changes, then there's
a production issue, then your manager needs some data for an exec
meeting, then... and you're left at the end of the day trying to piece
it all together. Ironically those are the days where it's most useful
to have had something like this, but I've never figured out the
balance.
temporallobe wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
I have played around with various methods (OneNote, personal wikis,
Markdown, etc.), but I have found that keeping 2 primary plain-text
personal notes has helped me a lot, preferably with Notepad++.
1) A simple text file with important information, with everything
including logins, host names, how-tos, even things like team
membersâ names and roles. I rarely change anything and often just
add information while marking previous obsolete info as such.
2) A simple TODO list that I just keep adding to. Many times I will
get requests that arenât necessarily tracked in project management
tools (either thereâs something that canât be encapsulated in a
user story, or the overhead of putting it into the software is just
too much).
In addition, IMO too much has been formalized into disparate systems
and can easily get lost or difficult to access. Keeping personal
notes like this enables me to have much more control and allows me to
easily search the entirety of my knowledge base with a simple text
search or even regex.
Edit: missed a few words
Derbasti wrote 1 day ago:
I always keep very sparse notes with pen and paper. Once the dust
settles, I transcribe them in full sentences into my digital journal.
This act of reconstructing a coherent narrative from disparate events
is an enormously useful part of writing the journal.
rzzzt wrote 1 day ago:
If you have one of these workdays, do you feel that you have actually
accomplished anything notable in the changelog? I find that it is
very hard to "sell" this electron-cloud-like helping out behavior
when you have an assigned task to complete, both to myself as well as
management.
Macha wrote 1 day ago:
Have I accomplished anything brag-worthy that day? Not really, but
having the list helps on two grounds. One is to have an explanation
of what was considered important enough to derail that, so I can
look at trends (e.g. Am I the only person on the team who knows
about X so I'm getting derailed by questions about X? Maybe it's
time to revamp the X docs or give a presentation on X). The second
is placating stakeholders elsewhere in the company. "We didn't do
that thing you asked for yet" on its own sounds like you just don't
care about them. "We didn't do it yet because of incident XYZ123
impacting $xxxK in revenue needed to be fixed" usually works
better.
malux85 wrote 1 day ago:
Simple, just write everything down. Making a quick note takes about
12 seconds. I make about 8-9 quick notes to summarise all tasks in
the day. Everybody has that amount of time to do it, EVERYBODY.
There is some cognitive burden (Find the note app, decide how to
store them, remember to open it) but if you do it for about 20 days
it just becomes second nature and habit.
I have day by day notes, for everything I have done and things I've
discovered, going back about 8 years now. Every single day, because
it only takes 1-2 minutes a day to write them. If you turn this into
a habit the mental context switch cost tends to zero.
It has been a great source of links, notes, reminders, everything, I
see it as my digital memory.
dleink wrote 1 day ago:
"Simple" but not always easy. I have executive function / working
memory issues so that cognitive burden you mention can be
untenable. My solution is to lower the load/latency of the
note-taking. I have a hotkey that pops up a text box where I can
jot a note, it shoots that to a file, then I organize it with a TUI
at the end of the day (or whenever!)
roland35 wrote 1 day ago:
I've found that the simpler the system, the more likely I am to
stick with it! I tried a complicated org mode setup, automated
obsidian plugins, and others but what ended up being the most
effective for me was just a very long bullet point list in notion!
I simply added headers for each month.
calebio wrote 1 day ago:
As a remote worker, it would be really cool to have something running
locally that had access to my Zoom logs/meeting transcripts, Slack,
email, calendar, etc.
Then take that and have it summarized what I did all day on the
computer.
hapidjus wrote 1 day ago:
I use Manictime for this. It keeps track of active applications,
you can add tags and it can take screenshots at defined intervals.
URI [1]: https://www.manictime.com/
y1n0 wrote 1 day ago:
The point of many tasks like this is in the doing. Writing
throughout the day what you are working and planning has an effect
on your focus and productivity, in and of itself.
Automating this kind of thing is automating your own defeat.
XorNot wrote 1 day ago:
This is technically what Microsoft Recall promises to do and no one
is happy about it.
LPisGood wrote 1 day ago:
Isnât it also what Apple Intelligence promises to do?
bestham wrote 1 day ago:
No, IIRC Apple Intelligence does not make such claims. It can
keep context within interactions and know about information in
some of your silos. Recall has a much bolder feature set in
that it wants to beware on everything you see on your screen.
Kinrany wrote 1 day ago:
It helps to write down every task that won't be solved immediately,
before doing it. This is also great when you're doing multiple things
in parallel.
photon_collider wrote 1 day ago:
Almost like keeping a personal write-ahead log. :)
koolba wrote 1 day ago:
Not quite. A write ahead log memorializes the final state of the
outcome. It should be everything you need to recreate the result
or net effect.
if you write it down before you start, itâs more like the
intent.
subarctic wrote 1 day ago:
I agree 100%, it's hard to keep this kind of thing up
d0mine wrote 1 day ago:
For me, it is the opposite: I can't work without writing down
todos in org-mode. Granularity may vary: I start from 2-4 todos per
day and write down anything that I can't do write now (2+min tasks)
throughout the day (org-capture). If the work is smooth, several
hours may pass on a single TODO heading, if I'm stuck, I can drop
to individual "- [ ]" list items, to mark the progress. It helps
with extending working memory and having the immediate feedback
helps with executive function.
No-thought generous fibonacci effort estimations help detect if
some tasks take too long (emacs nags in mode-line) and I need to
regroup e.g., split the current todo into sub tasks.
The changelog is generated automatically (from the org-clock-in
tasks) by Emacs (org-agenda).
dartos wrote 1 day ago:
I feel like I have the worst of both worlds.
I canât work effectively without a todo list, but I have
extreme trouble keeping with the habit.
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