[HN Gopher] Keeping a Changelog at Work (2020)
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Keeping a Changelog at Work (2020)
Author : lawgimenez
Score : 139 points
Date : 2024-12-21 06:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (code.dblock.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (code.dblock.org)
| Macha wrote:
| 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.
| subarctic wrote:
| I agree 100%, it's hard to keep this kind of thing up
| d0mine wrote:
| 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:
| I feel like I have the worst of both worlds.
|
| I can't work effectively without a todo list, but I have
| extreme trouble keeping with the habit.
| Kinrany wrote:
| 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:
| Almost like keeping a personal write-ahead log. :)
| koolba wrote:
| 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, it's more like the
| intent.
| calebio wrote:
| 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.
| XorNot wrote:
| This is technically what Microsoft Recall promises to do and
| no one is happy about it.
| LPisGood wrote:
| Isn't it also what Apple Intelligence promises to do?
| bestham wrote:
| 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.
| y1n0 wrote:
| 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.
| hapidjus wrote:
| I use Manictime for this. It keeps track of active
| applications, you can add tags and it can take screenshots at
| defined intervals. https://www.manictime.com/
| malux85 wrote:
| 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.
| roland35 wrote:
| 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.
| dleink wrote:
| "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!)
| rzzzt wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| Derbasti wrote:
| 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.
| temporallobe wrote:
| 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 members' 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 aren't necessarily tracked in project
| management tools (either there's something that can't 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
| teeray wrote:
| I do this myself, but I keep it strictly private. I'm mindful
| that while this record keeping has been very beneficial to me, it
| could also be wielded against me in ways I don't anticipate.
| esperent wrote:
| 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.
| teeray wrote:
| 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 don't like
| (LLMs). Obviously not directly applicable here--no one is
| training an AI on your logs. But my personal policy is rooted
| against oversharing. You can't use the data in ways I don't
| anticipate if you simply don't have the data. If I'm doing
| the work to produce that information, I am going to ensure
| that it used is entirely to my advantage.
| evnix wrote:
| 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.
| D-Coder wrote:
| 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.
| makerdiety wrote:
| 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]: https://github.com/zadam/trilium
| rsanek wrote:
| 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:
| 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?
| sunaookami wrote:
| I use Obsidian for this, it has a button that quickly creates a
| daily note: https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Daily+notes
|
| After a while I review the daily notes and delete or categorize
| + summarize them into subfolders (e.g. "Work", "Project XY",
| "Feature XY").
| neilv wrote:
| 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.)
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| 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.
| darthwalsh wrote:
| 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
| quaddo wrote:
| 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 tomorrow's date.
|
| If I get into a task that starts to get a bit 'chatty' and/or
| would benefit from capturing stdin/stdout/stderr snippets, I'll
| use the [[blah]] trick and dump it there.
|
| If a particular priority task didn't get tended to, I copy that
| into tomorrow's 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 week's
| tasks/priorities
|
| I use this page for my 1:1's of course. I've only very recently
| started copying the retrospective to my manager via Slack to
| ensure he's got the goods.
|
| I prep my incoming week with a new weekly summary, and pre-
| populate the bare bones for the daily notes.
| Noghartt wrote:
| Kinda related to the theme, but looking for other perspective.
| Having a brag document is a really useful way to track those
| things too:
|
| https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/
| xnickb wrote:
| I would recommend not using pixelation as means to hide text. It
| is easy to reverse.
| cl3misch wrote:
| 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.
| xnickb wrote:
| 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.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| 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.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > 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.
| wutwutwat wrote:
| 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:
| 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
| tra3 wrote:
| 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.
| gigatexal wrote:
| I have been doing this for years and it's amazing. It really does
| make meetings more useful because I can show people what I've
| done and they see it and know. It's 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 I'm 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. It's
| 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 everyone's benefit)
| PorterBHall wrote:
| 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. It's 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 it's encrypted.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > Since my first day in AWS, just over a year ago, I've 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.
| otohp wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| 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.
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| That's why I like https://www.timely.com/ since it records my
| activities automatically
| wodenokoto wrote:
| The article really lacks a discussion on the granularity of this
| "change log". Do you write "worked on db project" or do you
| detail progress and failures?
|
| I keep a daily log at work (not public) and sometimes it just
| says "project 1, project 2" for days on end. Not really useful to
| look back at, but still nice to jot down in the morning.
| gtpedrosa wrote:
| 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.
| lambrospetrou wrote:
| 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. https://www.lambrospetrou.com/articles/the-worklog-format-1/
| kabdib wrote:
| 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
| setheron wrote:
| 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..
| jurakovic wrote:
| 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]:
| https://gist.github.com/jurakovic/8c0535b3b8fbc96228de1a94ea...
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(page generated 2024-12-22 23:01 UTC)