A short introduction to developer diaries.
Diary - a Document of daily Records
Brief Overview
A diary allows to file information that you have gathered during a day at work. As a developer you probably know the situation that you hunt in the internet for a piece of information and are ready to apply it to get your work done. The Developer's Diary Add-on allows you to add this piece of information to your wiki without much effort. If it happens that you need this information a couple of weeks later, you have it already in your wiki and can find it by a text search.
You may also find interesting stuff you are not looking for:
- a video to watch later,
- a new product to check out,
- or a blog with plenty of articles to read.
Add a new event, paste the links with a couple of notes and file it to your wiki!
But why do you need a diary to log this information? Well, the diary is part of your personal space. Nobody should force you to add a particular structure on it. The diary goes one step further: since you add pages as records to your diary, there is no need to keep the information up-to-date. This both makes the diary a place where information gets stored without much overhead. Use the diary to access information you added in the past.
Start keeping a development diary. Write a little in it each day, explaining what you've been working on, justifying your design decisions, and vetting tough technical or professional decisions. Even though you are the primary (or only—it's up to you) audience, pay attention to the quality of your writing and to your ability to clearly express yourself. Occasionally reread old entries, and critique them. Adjust your new entries based on what you liked and disliked about the old ones. Not only will your writing improve, but you can also use this diary as a way to strengthen your understanding of the decisions you make and as a place to refer to when you need to understand how or why you did something previously.
Chad Fowler. The Passionate Programmer. 2009
A few weeks ago, I bought a notebook to help keep myself organized. It's been the best purchase I've made in a long time. I use it as a software developer's diary.
Every morning, I write a list of things I want to accomplish that day. Usually the list is somewhat optimistic, and I don't get to everything, but it gets me thinking about what I need to accomplish in the near future.
As I work through each item on the list, I make notes about what I've tried, why I've tried it, and what results I got. If I have any new ideas, I write them down before I forget them so I can come back and try them later. When I talk about what I've been working on at one of our SCRUM meetings, I use my notebook to help me keep my status reports short and concise but complete. I also write down any suggestions people give me.
At the end of the day, I write down, in bullet point form, each thing I worked on, the progress I made, and my thoughts about how to move forward. I use this to try and maintain perspective about a large project when I've been focusing on lower-level details all day.
Keeping a diary like this helps me keep my head clear and lets me work faster. I would recommend it to any developer.
Jay Conrod. Keeping a developer diary. 2009-05-24
One of the things that most of us fail is on keeping proper records of our accomplishments. Some developers rely exclusively on tools such as source control and bug management software to define their tasks and record accomplishments. I think this is not enough.
Keeping a programming diary is a good practice that can not only become a learning tool, but also avoid a lot of trouble in the future.
Many people use these ideas in one way or another, but I have seen no consistency in their use. Having a development diary is such a useful thing, however, that I recommend everyone to try it for a while. Understanding your own problems and decisions can make you learn more about where you need to improve. Ultimately, this is a discipline that can make you a better developer.
Carlos Oliveira. Day 3: Keep a Programming Diary. May 28th, 2009
Organize your Work
A diary allows you to plan for the day. Working on a plan helps you to get focussed and find important details about the tasks you want to accomplish. Although we know that planning is everything, the plan is nothing, in short iterations it is feasible to try to stick to your plan. This allows you to keep track on how you are doing in closing your tasks.
For every event on you working day, add an event document to your day. This event document will store every piece of information you regard to be valuable for later use. You may even tag these event documents with a subject, categories, and tags. This will make it easier to find related information or keep going on a theme of tasks that you work on over several days.
Note that you should not duplicate the information you already have in your JIRA. Your developer diary will automatically add the list of tasks you fixed on a particular day. If you find it easier to record information in your wiki than in your JIRA task, then create a new page in your wiki. Consider to choose the event doctype and link the new page with your JIRA task.
At the end of your working day, have a look at what you have done and run a short, personal retrospective. Describe what went well and where you can improve. Write it down and define actions to actually act on your insights. This organization of your work will be part of your improvement cycle and will enhance your happiness.
Jane McGonigal tells us why games make us happy:
- There is a defined goal to achieve which provides you with a sense of purpose.
- There are rules you have to follow that are known in advance.
- There is a feedback system that instantaneous allows you to determine you current state of play.
- And finally you are voluntary participating: You accept the goal and the rules.
Source: Reality is Broken (Jane McGonigal, 2011).
Job of a Software Developer
For sure this list cannot be matched easily to every job description. Therefore we assume that we focus on work related to software development and software developers in particular. Nonetheless the last one in this list is still not that easy to align with the software developer's daily work. But you can always vote with your feet if you prefer the chance of a change to the better against some form of security. This is certainly a personal decision and we do not want to focus on this one.
According to David Duncan Davidson your skills are just a way to get there.
I've never defined myself by my skills. Instead, I've always defined myself by what I have done and what I want to do next. Skills are just a way to get there.
James Duncan Davidson. Quoted in "The Passionate Programmer"
Define yourself about what you have done and what you will do. And make sure to talk in a business language to get understood by everyone in your team. Therefore Chad Fowler suggest to note the one and most important hit for you day. Explain this one hit from the business point of view. And make sure that you always prepare your day for having space for such a hit.
Write your Success Story
Be passionate!
If you want to be great at something you have to be passionate about it.
You have to be passionate about your work if you want to be great at your work. Chad Fowler. The Passionate Programmer. 2009
There is a tool to judge the happiness of a group called Niko-niko. Its application is rather simple: Add one of three type smilies to express your mood for a day. Since every member of a team expresses its mood in this way, one can quickly capture the mood of the whole team.
Chad Fowler suggests in his book to rate your level of excitement for your work on a 1 to 10 scale. A 1 tells that you hate your work, a 10 shouts out that you love it. The important thing is to think about what you can do today, to assign tomorrow a perfect 10? This will get you to constantly think about improving your situation.
Fowler recommends to track your excitement for a period of time. Two weeks track how you are doing, another two weeks trying to plan for the better. So use this tool as you benefit from it. Act on your numbers!
You can only be great at your work, if you are passionate and exited about it. Therefore the day document allows you to define your level of excitement for the coming day. There is also room to make you think and specify, what you can do today to improve you level of excitement for your work tomorrow. This also helps you to focus on things that are important to you.
Envision your Career
Defining daily and weekly goal helps you to stay focussed and get your work done. But to get the bigger picture you need to define what you want to accomplish within a year and even longer terms.
Cat: Where are you going?
Lewis Carroll
Alice: Which way should I go?
Cat: That depends on where you are going.
Alice: I don’t know.
Cat: Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.
The Developer's Diary Add-on provides two document types to visualize your career:
- Vision - help you to express your vision for your career in the coming years.
- Annual Vision - lets you get more precise to express what you want to do in the next months, up to one year.
While the vision is a long term tool, the annual vision is more concrete, especially for the next one two three months. Typically both contain your goals very coarse grained. Do not get too much into details, especially in case of the last quarters of the year and your long term vision.
Developer Diary for Confluence
projectdoc Developer Diaries provides templates to create your developer diary with Confluence and the projectdoc Toolbox. A year is organized in days that collect information about events that are supposed to be relevant for the future. Events may also work for having one's thoughts put straight to paper. Since each event is on its own page, which may seem too much work at first glance, it is easy to refer to it: from a web/wiki page, in a messenger post, or an email.
Install the projectdoc Toolbox for Confluence (free trial) now via
Get started with your developer diary:
