How to Track Your Engineering Work

4 points by codazoda 2 days ago

There are lots of reasons you might track your work. Maybe you do an annual performance review. Maybe you want to post status updates online. In my case, I want to create a monthly mailing list and let people know what I've been up to lately.

But, right now, I'm not keeping great track of my work.

I spend much of my day on the command-line and I typically enjoy command-line tools, so lets fix that with a quick bash script.

## How I want it to work

The syntax I ultimately want to use is something like the following:

    log "Something I did today"
## Echoing to a file

At first, I'm going to keep this extremely simple. I'll append the string to a file. The command to do that would be something like this:

    echo "Something I did today" >> ~/monthly.log
To break this down:

- echo prints the argument you pass it

- >> means to redirect that to the end of a file, appending to it

- ~/monthly.log means the log file in my home (~) directory

## Creating a shorter alias

Because I want a shorter command, just the word `log` followed by my comments, I'm going to put this into my `~/.zshrc` file as an alias. I use a Mac and have my terminal set to the default zsh shell. Something similar should work in Linux and maybe even Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Here's the alias I'll use:

    alias log="echo $1 >> ~/monthly.log"
This sets up an alias with the name of `log` that runs the echo command outlined above. You'll notice that I added `$1` this time. That's a variable that brings in the first argument after your command. So, I can now use the following command:

    log "Something I did today"
The result will be a `monthly.log` file in my home directory with that line added to it.

## Reducing future maintenance

That's great, and I could stop there, but it will be a little bit manual right now. Every month I would need to rename that file. Instead, I want it to write to a file named after the month automatically.

One way I could do that is by running the `date` command. Here's a command that outputs the date in the format `YYYY-dd`.

    date +%Y-%m
I can use backticks to run the date command and return its value into the alias above. Here's how my alias will look after I update it to do that.

    alias log="echo $1 >> ~/log/`date +%Y-%m`.log"
This will echo the first argument ($1) to a file named `~/log/2024-10.log` when you run it in October. There is no longer a need to do any updates manually. Your log will be stored in the `~/log` directory as a series of files named after the current month and year.

We've added a `log` directory to the path but that directory needs to exist before we can write to it. For now, I'll create the directory manually with the following command:

    mkdir ~/log
## Using a function instead of an alias

If you make your own logging command more complex, you're probably getting to the point where you should write a function instead of an alias. Here's an example of this updated to a function:

    function log() {
        if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
            echo "Usage: log \"<message>\""
            return 1
        fi
        echo "- $1" >> ~/log/`date +%Y-%m`.log
    }
## Happy logging

That's it. Happy logging!

In an upcoming post I'll figure out how to send this log as an email to a small number of subscribers.

Note: I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post a little how-to like this on HN. I don't think it's specifically disallowed in the rules but I'm not sure I've seen a lot of it either. Let me know if you think this doesn't belong here.

al_borland 2 days ago

I had to track everything I did for a while, then fill out weekly reports that were due monthly. I ended up writing something similar, where it would log everything to a single file with a timestamp. I then had some commands that would let me pull back the previous day, previous n days, or any specified date range.

Eventually I changed this up and made something that I could trigger with a keyboard shortcut, would pull up a prompt, and append it to a daily note I had in Obsidian.

I don't have to track things as much anymore and I noticed I became a lot more productive and a bit more happy when I wasn't worried about accounting for every minute of my work day.

  • codazoda 2 days ago

    I’ve been using Obsidian lately. I’m curious to know more about what you did to pull up a prompt. That could be a slick change.

    I also tried to do this for work, not because I was required to but because I was curious, and I also found it exhausting. Maybe logging only the main things would feel better.

    • al_borland 2 days ago

      I’ve done the text prompt a couple different ways.

      One was with HammerSpoon. The config is in Lua. I could bind a function to a keyboard shortcut, have it bring up a text field, and append the input to my file based on getting the current date.

      I also did something similar with AppleScript (which actually uses some JavaScript now) and used the native features of macOS to setup a keyboard shortcut. If I remember correctly this required some nonsense with Automator (maybe Shortcuts would be the way to go now). All of this was done because I was having some weird behaviors and wanted to get rid of HammerSpoon to reduce possible causes. HammerSpoon didn’t seem to be the problem.

      Previously when I was on Windows I’d use AutoHotKey for this kind of thing.

codingdave 2 days ago

> Let me know if you think this doesn't belong here.

Well, you asked, so... :)

No, posts like this are not disallowed, but neither is it the main goal of the site. Self-promotion is allowed... if it is a minor component of your contributions to the site. You do contribute to the site, so that would not be a problem. I'd recommend you just put up a blog, and post an occasional link to an off-HN post. When you do post here, don't copy/paste markdown. It doesn't render and makes the whole thing harder to read.

Personally, I dislike these types of posts, but I'm just one guy. There are probably a variety of opinions on the matter.

youio 2 days ago

have you tried taskwarrior?