I'm curious, how do people record the history of their adventures like this? I assume this doesn't all come from memory. And writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard. Or is it common?
Personally, I tend to create a master note for each project like this I dig into, and dump as much information into it as I can. This helps me keep track of what I’ve looked at and avoid retracing my steps too much, and in the end would be a good basis for a blog post.
I used to be able to write about things like this from memory, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to rely quite a bit more on journaling and using “2nd brain” tools like Obsidian.
One of the most useful habits I ever started is using Obsidian’s daily journal feature to jot things down every day:
- Things I’m working on that day
- How I’m feeling
- Ideas that pop up about projects
- References to useful sites / code snippets / various explorations
It’s one of the few tools I’ve found that lets me dump truly just about everything into it, and by the end of a project, I either have a nice collection of draft paragraphs to clean up in a blog post, or a nice future reference for myself when I want to do something similar in the future. And because of the automatic note-to-note connections that Obsidian builds, the daily journal always links back to the more concrete topic notes I’ve touched that day.
> writing some kind of diary for everything you mess around with must be hard
It was only hard until I had established the habit. Now I can’t imagine not doing it because of the productivity gains that come with it. I get further on things because everything I do leaves behind a tangible bit of progress (in the form of a note) that I can pick back up later.
Keeping a logbook is a part of experimental physics. In grad school, I learned "If you don't write it down, it didn't happen."
And a diary is easy and fun - just a sentence or two every day (even on a wall calendar) reminds you of experiences, travels, travails, and the daily whatnot of life.
Useful? Sure! My lab notebook and home diary were prime ingredients in writing m'book, The Cuckoo's Egg.
