How I keep a learning journal that I actually reread
A flat file, five questions, and a weekly review that survives real life.
What surprised me most was how small the final change was. Most of the work was understanding the problem precisely enough that the fix became obvious, and that understanding took far longer than the fix itself.
The problem
What surprised me most was how small the final change was. Most of the work was understanding the problem precisely enough that the fix became obvious, and that understanding took far longer than the fix itself.
The numbers below are from my own machine and my own workload. Treat them as a method, not a benchmark: the point is how the measurement was taken, not the exact figures it produced.
- Capture the current behavior before touching the code
- A second point, kept short on purpose
First attempt
By the end of this post you should be able to reproduce the whole thing yourself in under an hour, including the parts I got wrong the first time — those are marked so you can skip them if you're in a hurry.
Tools matter less than the feedback loop they enable. A fast, boring loop beat every sophisticated setup I tried, and I've kept it ever since, even as the rest of the stack changed twice over.
Everything above is the short version. The full write-up of how this played out is a story for another day — for now, the takeaway is simple: a flat file, five questions, and a weekly review that survives real life is a decision you make once and revisit deliberately.