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Ask HN: What's the best way to keep a project log or journal?

8 points by webmasterraj ↗ HN
Where you write down thoughts/what you did/next steps. I use text files, but it's a little hard to look back on afterwards in a cohesive way. I'm wondering if people use other ways?

11 comments

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japhyr
Text files and grep to look back. Then when a project starts to have some longevity I skim through the notes and make more formal documentation of some aspects of the work I'm doing.

I think I'll always stay with simple text files for projects that may or may not go anywhere.

qrv3w
Plain text files are a great way to go. You should check out JRNL, https://maebert.github.io/jrnl/. It uses a single file and allows encryption and basically provides easy simple command line support for adding time-dated entries.
stakent
After a lot of fiddling with different options I use Vimwiki running in separate Vim instance on dedicated virtual screen.

Hit ^6, hit enter, hit F4 to put the timestamp, write. Done.

canterburry
Your git commit logs... Because what you actually accomplished is all that really matters.
trcollinson
I'm not entirely sure why this was downvoted. I think this is a more than reasonable way of keeping track. And honestly, with git commit messages you can even keep track of the things you want to do next.
wingerlang
I disagree, I keep just about everything. Obviously the git is /the/ log for the code itself. But there's more to a project than code. I routinely take screenshots and just dump them into a "art dump" folder. It is nice to look back at ideas and features that went away, maybe for a "behind the scenes" look.

Git also doesn't keep ideas, brainstorm and discussion about them. I use Trello for this but it's just personal. But it lets you easily file things as "maybe some day" and "actually doing/done".

devarist
Devarist is built for keeping a work journal. It supports Markdown and images too.

Check it out, feedback is very welcome :-)

https://devarist.com