A good habit I picked up at the last place was keeping “snippets” - short notes about what I worked on in a particular week. Something like this:

Weekly snippets: $project cleanup; meetings & troubleshooting.

“Short” week, in that I carried 2 days’ work into it. All caught up (down?) now.

  • Removed daemonization code from $project- we expect to run it under supervisor everywhere. $link

  • Updated $otherproject to depend on that, plus Puppet changes to run under supervisor, deployed to $cluster.

  • Ran and wrote up a $topic meeting. $link

  • A frustrating day investigating $protocol issues in $cluster, much excluded but nothing pinpointed. Also some troubleshooting support during an incident on Thursday night - opened $task and updated $doc for followup.

  • Wrote up a plan for $new_project.

  • Discussed $speculative_project ideas with Eman & Charlie.

  • Copious Free Time: started working on Simple ESP Security Association Manager.

I write about this here because snippets are brilliant. I love having them to look back over - to find PRs I worked on, or docs I wrote, or when what happened, what I was thinking at a particular time. Without them, I’d be at a loss to explain what I did in any particular month, or would need to reconstruct that from old notes or emails. Writing a retrospective of my first year at the new place - do I get to call it new after a year? - pulled this into focus.

Some of my colleagues keep daily snippets. I find that weekly is about the right granularity for me: real nitty-gritty detail is in a notebook I maintain day to day. We’ve taken to just submitting them to a Github repo, and made a robot to notify us when something’s committed so we can follow along. As a remote worker, I need to make it easy for the team to stay in touch with my work, and snippets certainly help.