IT Lab Diary: best IT friend

John D K -

I started my lab diary back in 2010, about 7 years ago, and since then I’ve not only learned a lot, but have improved my programing skills. It’s been one of the best steps I’ve made in my career.

Lab diary has gave me confidence, valuable knowledge, better documentation, my competency map, and most importantly save my time.

Some of the key things I’ve been able to do because of it:

  • Get all my knowledge in fastest possible way - code, tricks and simple tips
  • Have time in the end of the day to summarize , read and analyze my daily work and to plan next day activities
  • Make time for research, which helped me follow new trends and technologies
  • Change my attitude: from I know everything to I know a lot and I want to learn more
  • Share all my learned knowledge in this blog
  • Enjoy the path that I walked from a newbie to a real developer.
  • Invest day by day a small amount of time and get in return time, knowledge and good friend.
  • Diary will be your guide in endless IT world. Imagine a captain in the ocean without a navigation. This was me before the diary, now I know where am I and where I want to go.

Lab diary rules:

  • Every day at the end spend 15 minutes to summarize the day, keep valuable information and good pieces of code
  • Once a week review the newly added weekly information and get your conclusions - the bad, the good and the change
  • On daily basis spend 30 minutes for research - read tech articles, tech news, blogs. Learn by other people experience and you will be amazed by other people
  • Several times per week try some small challenge(my examples):
  • automate a boring mail task
  • create small bot program to answer when you are N/A
  • write a small script that tweets on a custom events
  • write a complex regex(regular expression) that will do part of my job at work and will save me ton of time
  • Spend time to organize the item in categories. Initially you will be confused a lot. When the diary grows up you will have a better picture of it.

Lab diary example categories:

This is just a small part of my diary but it gives a good picture of the structure of it

  1. Administration
    1.1 Windows
    1.2 Linux
    1.3 DB
  2. Technical Information
    2.1 Programing
    2.1.1 Groovy
    2.1.2 Python
    2.2 Applications
    2.2.1 DB
    2.2.2 IDE
    2.2.3 Browsers
    2.3 Algorithms
    2.4 Frameworks
  3. Projects
    3.1 Project 1 *
  4. Resources
  5. Examples
  6. Not Sorted

*All my project folders has one and the same file structure and are created by using this code Code creating folder structure

I hope you’ll join me. Building your own Lab Diary!