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19 pointsaluket10 comments

I've been tracking my personal diary with http://jrnl.sh/ and backed up encrypted on GitHub. Why use this?

Neat! I like how it balances simplicity of use (should be no harder than `echo "shipped v1.0" >> journal.txt`) and useful features (tags, dates, export to json/markdown/etc) and stays in plaintext format

Sounds nice enough, but I am not being shown anything. I would like to at least see a mockup or a barebones demo before giving up my email.

So the website tries really hard to not give much information.

Given the name I expected some sort of power user desktop app integrated with the system, but after going through the form it actually is a very simple webapp.

There's two buttons to create text/code entries, a per-day view of said entries, and a search bar.

I think that the idea is good, I could certainly use a better tool than my text editor to keep a journal of everything that matters to me, but in its current form I don't see how having to manually post text notes on this webpage would make the task significantly easier.

OP here, thanks for taking the time to look at this. Quite agree that it is light on features and is a minimal implementation of what we would like to build. It's something that we thought would be useful, that we would use ourselves and wanted to get some early feedback to see if the idea has traction.

I'm disappointed that this doesn't actually emulate a Unix device.

Streaming to /dev/journal would be a tight little feature. Maybe it has an API?

I feel like keeping a journal/working notes is an underused tool by most programmers. It's amazing how often I think. "What was that bash command I used 9 months ago" or " What project was I working on 2 years ago. I actually keep 4 separate ones. In order that I started doing them.

0. A personal journal that just tracks what I'm doing and how I feel about it. Both work and personal

1. A work version of "How To" any time there's an arcane command, or set of steps I need to perform on an irregular basis.

2. A work $current_project working notes. This is just a brain dump of every thing I'm thinking about for it and every piece of information I need.

3. A personal $current_project working notes.

I'm thinking about doing something similar, what do you use to write it down? Pen and & paper, or some digital format like Markdown?

Do you simply store what you're doing or also the how? Some folks recommend keeping a record of your thought process while designing/working on things. Others keep records of bash commands/other factual info.

What's your approach?

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