Written by Jonathan
on January 8, 2022

Yesterday I learnt

In a previous blog post I mentioned that I write a kind of log of what I do every day. The two primary purposes of this activity are;

to keep a track of the hours I worked and,
to have a handy reminder of what I did, for example when preparing for standup.

The journeyToWork section that I quoted in the previous post has been phased out years ago and during 2020 after some experimentation I ended up with the following format;

  
  Tuesday:

  log:
    09:00 -> 15:00:
      - Standup
      - Pair programming with Espen
      - Investigate RBAC usage with storage account
  
  accomplishments:

  planForDay:
    - RBAC storage
    - Do we need WAF in front of storage?
  
  planForNearFuture:
    - ...

The intention here was that the log section was the basis for the stated goals then accomplishments was supposed to be a place to remember and celebrate any achievements along the way. planForDay was supposed to be filled out at the start of the work day to have a clear idea of what I was going to do that day and finally planForNearFuture was for tasks that would soon make it onto planForDay.

Unfortunately I’m not that disciplined. accomplishments remained empty every day, planForDay ended up being a hidden task list that should have been in an open project tool like Jira/Trello and planForNearFuture just got copied from day to day with no real curation or maintenance.

This year I’m attempting to mix it up a little. This year the only thing I intend to keep is the log section, then I’m adding a new section "What did I learn yesterday?".

The goal here is that instead of just looking forward at the next thing to do, that I should spend a minute or two reflecting on the details of what I did the previous day and identify moments of learning. So now my logs look more like the following;

  
  Thursday:
  
  log:
    8:30 -> 16:30:
      - Slack discussion
      - Started documenting Network Policies thoughts
      - Code review postgres role PR
      - Slack discussion about ingress IP
      - Discussion about acr purge
      - Continued documentation about network policies
  
  "What did I learn yesterday?":
    - AKS uses only destination IP for NetworkPolicies, this means you break
      the encapsulation of services

I’m hoping that this has a similar effect to recording achievements but with a much lower barrier to entry onto the list. A secondary effect I hope to see is that I will identify topics on which I have knowledge that can and should be shared with others, whether that is here on this blog, in project documentation or internally at work knowledge sharing events.

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