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Keeping a Changelog at Work (2020)

162 点作者 lawgimenez5 个月前

21 条评论

Macha5 个月前
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.
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teeray5 个月前
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.
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neilv5 个月前
I&#x27;ve done this at some companies, and for some consulting engagements.<p>The last company where I initially did it, I stopped, because I found two problems with how I was doing it:<p>* spending extra time to track this information that was usually already captured somewhere in a project tracking system; and<p>* sometimes siloing information, when all the redundant reporting means that sometimes one place got the information, while another place didn&#x27;t (so, sometimes it was only in my separate notes, which weren&#x27;t discoverable).<p>One time I didn&#x27;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&#x27;s there.<p>One thing that doesn&#x27;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&amp;project management system, that gives them more insight into how everyone has been contributing. (Personally I&#x27;d prefer to be at a company where no one has to even think about performance evaluations, because they&#x27;re too busy focused on success of the company, but the info is probably there if anyone wanted it.)
shepherdjerred5 个月前
I&#x27;ve done something like this for a year or two with a single Markdown document + Obsidian. I call it my &quot;working set&quot; 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&#x27;m trying to be particularly productive.<p>At the end of the day I make an entry for the next day carrying over what I didn&#x27;t finish. If something has been carried over for too long (e.g. something that I&#x27;d like to do but isn&#x27;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.<p>If I have larger investigations I&#x27;ll always write it down in a separate Markdown document so that my working set doesn&#x27;t grow too large.<p>It&#x27;s a very low overhead way to do task tracking, and there are all of the benefits listed in the parent article. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d ever make this publically available though.
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anal_reactor5 个月前
&gt; 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!<p>I think this is a great idea for CEOs and those overly eager juniors, but for everyone else who&#x27;s not trying to speedrun work burnout any%, that&#x27;s the stupidest idea ever. Seriously, what&#x27;s the goal here? Suppose everyone in your company does this. The result is that employees get divided into three camps:<p>1. Those who don&#x27;t give a fuck about their jobs and have exactly one entry per day. For them, their CHANGELOG (don&#x27;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.<p>2. Those who don&#x27;t give a fuck either, but understand the point above and don&#x27;t want to get fired: they&#x27;ll start filling their day with useless tasks, just to look busy. There&#x27;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.<p>3. A clique of employees turning their CHANGELOG (again, don&#x27;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.<p>It&#x27;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.
gigatexal5 个月前
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.<p>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.<p>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)
PorterBHall5 个月前
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.
lambrospetrou5 个月前
I have also written about my &quot;worklog&quot; [1], what I call my own changelog at work.<p>It&#x27;s a simple Markdown file, versioned on my own Gitea instance.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>If anyone does not keep a worklog, start now :)<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lambrospetrou.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;the-worklog-format-1&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lambrospetrou.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;the-worklog-format-1&#x2F;</a>
gtpedrosa5 个月前
I&#x27;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 &quot;Client X - Report&quot;, but I summarize what I&#x27;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&#x2F;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.
D-Coder5 个月前
I do something like this and it&#x27;s helpful.<p>I tend to forget about a task once it&#x27;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 (&quot;2024.12.21 Worked on xyz feature&quot;) for several days in a row, but at review time, it was easy to see what I&#x27;d accomplished.
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Noghartt5 个月前
Kinda related to the theme, but looking for other perspective. Having a brag document is a really useful way to track those things too:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jvns.ca&#x2F;blog&#x2F;brag-documents&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jvns.ca&#x2F;blog&#x2F;brag-documents&#x2F;</a>
BehindBlueEyes5 个月前
I keep track of everything i do in excel privately too. I have a log like that since my first job, dating back a dozen years.<p>I use some basic conditional formatting to highlight today&#x27;s tasks. I write down everything I do. Small assists and unplanned work are added after the fact. Each row had a do date, a project tag, and notes such as reminders of who to contact about it.<p>This helps me be extremely organized and not forgetting any tasks even down the road. I also keep track of pet projects and identify good times to work on those. Also made me way better at guesstimating how long something will take and spread out workload from upcoming busy periods more.<p>This has made it trivial for me to prepare weekly stand ups, quarterly business reports and yearly reviews. The only downside is I can&#x27;t keep it up when I&#x27;m really overworked. Those periods stand out as several week gaps in the task tracker. I just lose the granularity but i still know which project was problematic using high level roadmaps and notes from retros&#x2F;5 whys - so i can add a basic note for the period about what projects i was working on at the time. I have a simplified changelog like that for personal projects as well.
kabdib5 个月前
i keep a very simple &quot;notes.txt&quot; file and just append to it; i add a timestamp at the start of every day. literally no other formal structure<p>i put nearly everything in it that is interesting. snippets of code, bits of debugging sessions, notes from meetings, little reminders. it&#x27;s a single file that my editor loads in milliseconds and it&#x27;s very searchable<p>i&#x27;ve been doing this for over 35 years (... starting over at each new company). having a &quot;dump&quot; of knowledge at my fingertips has saved me hours, many times
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wodenokoto5 个月前
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?<p>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.
tra35 个月前
I send my task list along with notes to chatgpt to summarize, and log the output. It&#x27;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.
schmooser5 个月前
I keep weekly notes in my work Org Roam project, Week-N-of-2024.org, where I store all the current work. At the end of the week I carry on TODO&#x2F;DOING&#x2F;WAITING headings. Every heading usually references topical Org Roam notes, so checking backlinks I can trace the work progress.<p>To keep it public - I tag certain headings with :Priority: tag and then use Org-QL to find them, pretty-print (enrich with Story links , completion date), sort by priority, TODO state etc; then export to HTML and copy-paste into Confluence.<p>The trick is to balance between granularity of items. I definitely don’t want to make everything public, but I do want to have everything in my notes, and this method solved it - the best of all tried over 15 years.
tpoacher5 个月前
I do something similar, and in fact have some useful bash scripts to help me remember to log stuff.<p>Basically it&#x27;s a script that pops up a reminder window at regular intervals, with options for daemonising, and enabling&#x2F;disabling while daemonised, and auto-enabled at startup if it&#x27;s a new day.<p>Plus, it integrates with a pomodoro timer&#x2F;logger I&#x27;ve written, such that all the &quot;tomatoes&quot; (i.e. pomodoro sessions) I&#x27;ve done the day before automatically get added to the log at the start of a new day.<p>They&#x27;re fairly simple scripts, but happy to share if anyone&#x27;s interested.
jurakovic5 个月前
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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;jurakovic&#x2F;8c0535b3b8fbc96228de1a94ea910e0d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;jurakovic&#x2F;8c0535b3b8fbc96228de1a94ea...</a>
setheron5 个月前
I really enjoyed Snippets at Google which was a company wide way to share your changelog.<p>There were also some nice integrations to pull in commits, doc edits , etc..
otohp5 个月前
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.
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xnickb5 个月前
I would recommend not using pixelation as means to hide text. It is easy to reverse.
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