Benefits of keeping a Dev Journal

I have been keeping a dev journal for almost 6 months now. There are some weeks I write less and I always end up regretting it.

Sense of accomplishment at the end of the day

I was finding a lot of my days feeling "busy" at work but then not feeling a sense of accomplishment at the end. Especially, if its is a more meeting heavy day. Now, I have a log of the important conversations I had, key decisions I made or helped faciliate as well as the tiny tasks that I completed that normally I would not pay attention to afterwards. However, when I review my day at the end they hold more value.

Attention in meetings

I have a fixed place to take notes so I ended up taking more notes in meetings. This ends up with me being more attentive.

Forces me to slow down

Because I end up writing most messages in Obsidian first before posting them in Jira / Slack I have a chance to correct typos. Furthermore, I get an opportunity to edit and reword my thoughts, leading me to make my arguments more clearly.

Good staging area for long prompts

I find that Claude is more useful if I have a good first prompt. In my Dev Journal I try to list out the requirements more clearly. This has a dual benefit of giving me and the LLM clarity about the task.

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