Laboratory science has much in common with software engineering:
We take a new language or technology and experiment with it to see what it can do and how it performs. When we practice Test-Driven Development, every failing test that we write encodes a hypothesis: that the test actually will fail! We gather and study data obtained from our system and its surrounding environment as we troubleshoot incidents. We hypothesize causes, and we try to reproduce results.
Today we’ll walk through the next summarization level we need in our dev logs: monthly reviews.
We’re slowly climbing a mountain:
Daily logs tell us the quantum details of what we did on a specific day. Weekly reviews roll those details up into atomic accomplishments for the week. Monthly reviews compose those accomplishments into molecular deliveries. Pardon the poor quantum physics analogy, but I think it’s apropos. We are building what Tiago Forte calls “intermediate packets.
Today I’m going to teach you how to begin your journey to harvesting insights from your dev log.
You should expect a healthy ROI from the time you spend capturing your daily activities. Simply writing down everything you do each day isn’t enough. Reviewing and summarizing the week is like conducting a mini-retrospective with yourself.
Unfortunately, most people never conduct a single weekly review.
Because they don’t know how. Not only that, but:
To harvest meaningful patterns from your dev log, you’ll need to capture the same things daily.
I’ve been engineering software for 21 years, and I’ll share what I’ve routinely kept in mine. Your context is different, so your list will be also. Just make sure you capture the same things daily.
Use this list as a skeleton to start from. It’s easier when you aren’t starting from a blank page!