The need for a work log
I work as a Software Engineer at a University in Italy, I'm not going to say which one (yet, who knows...) but 1) it's easy to find out if you look for it on my social media profiles and 2) let's say it's one of the best in Europe for business and economy matters.
That said, I'm kind of a control freak, in general, but specifically about my work. Unfortunately, for its nature, it's not always possibile to schedule every activity in advance and build task lists to check items as soon as they're done. I often get calls on Microsoft Teams, which usually generate issues to be created in Jira, which leads to analysis to be made and SQL or Python scripts to be implemented, which are going to be versioned on GitHub and so on. Nothing special to be honest, I think I'm describing 90% of the activities performed by people who work with applications and IT stuff BUT, as already said, calls and emails are not "foreseeable" and therefore they cannot be reported in a task list before the workday starts. Anyway, being control freak, I like to do lists and look at them (yeah, it's something I should investigate, I know) with all those beautiful checkmarks. Damn, they look SO GOOD. Besides, there are some serious benefits in keeping a work journal, even if for me would probably be more like a work log/report rather than a proper journal.
So, being also automation-addicted, I'm thinking about writing a simple Python script that reads data across all systems (or better, the ones which provide REST APIs) I use during my day-to-day activities and save them in a SQLite database. Then, I'm thinking about a simple web app, maybe written with Bottle framework, to serve a single html template showing the data as list groups. I want to keep the whole thing extremely simple, so everything must run on my local machine: no online availability, deployments or pipelines.
The whole idea is to have two scheduled task that run after I login into my pc, which do the following:
- Run the script to populate data
- Run the Bottle web server on localhost as a subprocess
I'm thinking about getting data from the following platforms, this is an on-going brainstorming so the list could change completely:
- Jira and Confluence contributions.
- GitHub commits and release (on organization repos only, not my personal ones).
- Outlook calendar events and sent emails.
- Microsoft Teams phone calls log (spoiler alert: this is going to be nearly impossible)
The data I'm going to save will have:
- Date timestamp
- System name
- key/item/other detail
- summary/title
- url (if any)
As I'm interested also in LLMs, I'm going to leverage some generative AI tools, Bing chat and Phind for the most part.
Will I get what is slowly sketching in my mind? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile I'd like to suggest some good posts I find inspirational: The top 7 software engineering workflow tips I wish I knew earlier by Jordan Cutler and Guide to Keeping a Work Journal by Jawwad.
See ya in the next one!
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