Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

I've been using GitHub issues for this for a couple of years, and I really like it.

Any time I run into a bug, no matter how minor, I open an issue for it. I then use comments on that issue to track every step I use to fix it - adding screenshots, pasting in blocks of command-line output, linking to debugging tools I use etc.

I usually end up with an issue thread with a dozen or so comments, all by me. I often refer back to old issue threads to remind myself how I debugged something.

Here's an example from yesterday: https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/1124

View on HN

Very interesting, thanks for sharing - but also looks like a lot of work. What's the overhead in doing this additional work?

It’s easier than trying to remember it all. I have a habit of doing this at work, and it benefits not only me but the next person who needs information. It helps justify promotions and raises too.

When you can do this openly it helps build a public body of work that can earn you better jobs.

People like you are the reason for impostor syndromes

The overhead is really slim. I'm basically using issue comments as personal notes - the time consuming part is figuring out what to do, while turning that into a sentence of text and maybe a link or pasted example is a fraction of that effort. And the productivity boost I get from having useful notes is enormous.

It's particularly valuable for multi-tasking: I can have a lot more projects on the go at once if I don't have to remember details of what I was working on or where I had got to for each one.

> Any time I run into a bug, no matter how minor, I open an issue for it. I then use comments on that issue to track every step I use to fix it - adding screenshots, pasting in blocks of command-line output, linking to debugging tools I use etc.

Not to be snarky or anything, but isnt't that how they were always intended to be used? At least in each and every single job I had, that's how tickets were always used.

Until recently I used them like that for collaborative projects with other people, but not for personal projects where I was the only participant.

I still don't get it. Keeping a public worklog is intended to help other people, not yourself.

That's why you're keeping your logs public, not in your personal engineering notebook.

You post stuff in the ticket to make that stuff public, and keep it public, and allow others to see and query it.

My personal engineering notebook IS my public issues now, for all of my open source projects (which is almost all of my projects).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com