I recently was struggling with an design/architecture issue all day, and when I was finished I thought about writing down some thoughts about the what/how/why aspects of my solution for future reference. I then stumbled on the term 'developer diary' for this kind of thing (for ex. https://www.smartics.eu/confluence/display/PDAC1/Developer+Diaries), that apparently some software developers hold in high regard.
I will be trying to keep my own (though a bit more light/free form than that in the link) in order to bring a bit more structure to my day-to-day.
Do you have any experience with developer diaries? Have they helped you become a better developer, and if so, what kind of effects did you notice?
What finally made it into a working solution is writing plain markdown files, one per day, automatically synced to bitbucket via tiny bash scripts that initiate a new file for the day (aliased to 'j' for minimal hurdle to start writing), opens them in an editor, and committs to the repo after closing the editor.
It is available here: https://github.com/samuell/mdnote
The nice thing with markdown, if you make a level-1 header for each new file, is that you can concatenate the file into a long file, and run pandoc -i allnotes.md -o allnotes.epub, and get a formatted and searchable notebook for offline use, when you want to read it, with the Level-1 headings denoting chapters - so, one chapter per day!
(I have a script for this too of course: https://github.com/samuell/mdnote/blob/master/as_epub.sh).