Lots of developers that I've met and read about highly recommend keeping a Dev Journal. Stand-ups and check-ins in professional development and engineering teams happen daily to keep track of their progress. There's also a devjournal tag within this Dev.to community with lots of focused posts on their learning.

But for someone like me, a self-taught dabbler, I've tried millions of different journals including Apple Notes, Notion, and my most recent obsession, Obsidian. Even though Obsidian does have a UI and workflow that I am easily accustomed to, its daily notes intuition just doesn't really cut it for me. I'm someone who hates looking at blank pages. It's uninspiring and incredibly dangerous, because that's where the options are limitless and at the same time they're nowhere.

So I've built a few templates for my daily notes to track my progress, but I still find them pretty underwhelming since I have to click through all of them to read what I did the past week or month. This kept me from continuing the consistency of writing everyday, let alone the fact that I took time out of my day to do this, that led up to a bunch of lost notes with no actual context of progress or reflective insights.

Relative to this, it's easier for me to look through photos, i.e. a gallery style visual board to see what I was doing the the past week or month. I've tried writing in this style within an Obsidian note with the simplest formats: The month it is, the day of the month and what I'm working on, all within the same page, so I can scroll to the top when I'm at the end of the month to see how much I've progressed.

This of course isn't the best solution but it's somehow working at the moment. I've initially thought of starting an Instagram or Twitter account dedicated to post short videos of my progress, however I'm terrified of how I instantly get distracted once the focus shifts to gathering a social media following instead of my learning.

Share with me some of the progress-tracking tools you've used! Should I start an Instagram account or just keep going with my Obsidian page workflow? Do you face the same troubles as I do? Let me know what you think and do drop me a follow too!