devlog

bugfixing indyvoter drove me to crazed thoughts of conversational development methods: of consensus code generation without becoming a slave to formalisms or change control regimes. we all wander down paths of reasoning, change APIs, leaving no breadcrumbs on the onramp.

i didn’t have to invent a development methodology: i stole one from the preface to Tom Igoe’s excellent “physical computing”, which i’m holding off on reading til i have time for homespun electronics. It’s called journalling.

1. First, keep a journal of the journey. Write down your ideas as you go, as well as the questions you have, the problems you encounter, and the solutions you come up with.
2. Second, work fast and at a high level.
3. Third, don’t become paralysed by planning.
4. Fourth, collaborate with other people. Explaining yourself, particularly to people who do not think like you, will keep you honest.

The idea is not so much to record the what and the how of what you did - that stuff’s for cvs commit notes, or even for code comments. While journalling, every time you arrive at a decision fork, and take a decision path, you make a note of what you were thinking when you did it. In dreams we could annotate code directly with journal fragments, but i wanted a tiny spike solution to get started.

Journaller is a tiny irc bot which logs journal entries when you address it. I thought of using a chump, but it does more than i want, or a plog, but it’s too tied to blosxom, and supplies more comments-upon-comments than i wanted - just something very simple and write-only. Even a vi macro writing to a text file would do the job - mainly to switch context as little as possible, to make journalling seem like less of an overhead.

So far, success in actually journalling a project has been limited. It’s so easy to get definedly engrossed, to wish not to break the flow. I wonder why that is, and what effect a bit of slightly enforced introspection on the writing process would afford. Mostly i want to have the logs that tell me what i was thinking two years ago, right now…