Ask HN: Diary of a programmer?

[sundar22in]

I recently started maintaining a diary using emacs org-mode. So far for about a month i have been maintaining a diary, i just write whatever comes to my mind.

Now i want to structure it, so that i can extract information about me in future. In my diary i write both my personal and professional happenings.

1. I would like to know whether the fellow hackers maintain a diary? 2. What was their experience (useful/useless)? 3. How they structured it (A sample template will be useful)

[arh68]

I do keep a running log of ideas in org-mode, but it's by no means comprehensive (I can only really use it at home). I keep most things in a notebook, but typing is so much faster I can't help it. I have a few files for various topics; I usually just create a new org heading for each timestamp and write a few paragraphs. Presumably I could tag each timestamp if there was something important, but I rely on search more than tagging. Each heading looks like (* Mon Sep 17 17:51:24 EDT 2012), newest up top. I open up the .org file, M-S-Enter, C-u M-! date, C-n and start writing. Not going to win any organization awards, but that's not what it's about.

It seems useful, just as useful as writing (except the not-always-with-me part). Getting an idea out on a screen or on paper is usually helpful, if only so I can forget it and clear my mind.

[roedog]

I keep both an electronic diary and an engineering notebook in a physical lab notebook. I find both helpful to getting organized and developing my thoughts. I would never publish any of these. They are for my use only.

I format my diary very simply. The key for me is to not get distracted while I'm writing. I use two formats: a dated journal: a date and entries that follow. This works in any kind of editor. The other format I use is more subject based, with org-mode, and headings to split up topics.

org-mode has a tag feature, where you can add lists of tags to a header. I might try that for categorizing my entries for future sorting.

[duiker101]

I do not say that is a bad idea because I really can't say, but i would have never the time to do that, I have very little time to do anything, writing a diary of which I will read again 1% would be not a good use of my time I think. Instead I would maintain a blog, or at least make it public. This way it might be helpful to other people and you maintain the aspect of reviewing what you did or keeping it for the future.

[evoxed]

I maintain my personal site as a remote git repo, and all of my journal files get backed up there. So I add to the journal, git push web, and what's done is done. It's up to you what you want to keep private but I've fallen in love with the workflow. Anyway, if you're worried about the time it takes to maintain a journal, perhaps you should try spending a few weekends exercising your typing skills. My entries are only 30-45 lines each (wrapped, tw=80) but take only a few moments to clack in and done.

[sundar22in]

Writing a diary can be few minutes every day.

I would like to keep personal stuff private, its not a good idea to make everything public.

[evoxed]

I actually started doing the same thing a month ago as well, but in vim. Nothing special, just an entry :x {} which is easy enough to jump to and lists and whatnot done intuitively– something like the lovechild of org-mode and markdown.

Useful: script to open the file into the buffer at the end of every day.

Wishlist: soft links so that I can cursor over a project title, action it to open something in a new buffer or just run a script.

[idoh]

For the wishlist, you can add this to .vimrc: map gf :tabnew

Then you can gf over the project name, and then you'll either create a new file with that name or open that file. I use the technique for a personal minimalist wiki: http://idoh.com/#2365733587