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"

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

- 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"

    log "Something I did today"

## 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

    alias log="echo $1 >> ~/log/`date +%Y-%m`.log"

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

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
    }

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.