Journaling: an idea for devs

If you’re a developer, you will find here a simple way of doing journaling with git, and what I’ve been thinking about that in the last weeks. Recently, I’ve been with my mind pretty filled up. Trying to remember everything has been exhausting. That’s why I’ve tried to go back to journaling. One of the things that I’ve done in the beginning of my career is giving short daily statuses at work. That was something that I’ve discovered to be awesome, since it organized my day, but also helped me to just feel very comfortable to forget my work right after 5 p.m.

There was no good reason for me to have stopped doing that, but I did. Since it was so long that I’ve not been journaling, I wanted to start anew with some improvements from what I’ve been doing before. As I feel rewarded for learning new things, giving this “treat” to myself would make this much more pleasant.

Before, I was simply recording my daily work notes the way I was presenting them in Slack. They were 100% local since I was using Obsidian and didn’t want to pay any sync plans. It was good. Obsidian can be very powerful, but it has two limitations that I did not like: 1) being paid to use cloud sync and 2) using Electron (I hate Electron).

Here I will present how I managed to sync my notes, and how I organize them.

The first thing: I wanted to use markdown + git. It’s simple (as I am a dev), it’s free, and I can use a thousand editors that would work fine. The problem was: how was I supposed to use it on my phone? There are a thousand Android/IOS markdown editors, but do they support Git?

So I’ve searched through some apps, just to be disappointed with the bugs of those small editors we can find on the internet. Then I’ve stumbled upon Obsidian again. Their app on Android supports community plugins, and there is an awesome plugin for git there. So that’s it! I can edit with my favorite editor on my PC, and I can use Obsidian on my cellphone and sync everything with Git, awesome!

So the only thing missing was organizing it. I am currently using journal/year/month/YYYY-MM-DD.md for my everyday tasks, but also I have a random folder for miscellaneous notes, a ideas folder for blog posts and ideas, and a plans folder with my monthly and yearly plans. It’s been working pretty well the last few weeks.

Lately, the key to success in putting something that helps me on my routine, is to do it in a very practical, nice and pleasurable way. Making things bearable is something that makes a habit much easier to maintain long-term. The idea of just doing it (remember the Shia LaBeouf meme?) and don’t worry about it too much has been helping. I wouldn’t be so happy with the solution if it wasn’t so personalized as well. That attitude has helped me to be mentally healthier and more productive lately. One example of that was posting two blog posts these past months. I hope this lasts.