If you ever watched Star Trek, you know that the opening scene is usually something along the lines: “Captain’s log, year 2355…” I always loved those moments, as they offered gateway into the captain’s mind and his feelings, decisions he has to make and ultimately choices that impact the whole crew.
Anyway, this blog post is about having a personal log (sadly not related to exploring deep space in a starship), but related to my everyday work as a verification engineer. My journey is still interesting, I assure you.
I started logging my work years ago, without even being aware of how much value it brings and so I decided to share my experiences in hopes they may inspire my readers to explore similar options which will bring huge benefits.
How it all started
Many years ago, while I was still a junior engineer, I was part of a team working on a very important and demanding project. At that time, I often worked on 4-5 tests in parallel and I quickly realized that I need some kind of tool, or framework if you will, that will help me not get lost in all those tasks, emails to respond to, cases to review and reports to write.
At that time (2013-2014) I didn’t think too much about it and so I decided to start a simple word file, in which I would be writing down what I am doing and what I need to do. Below I show few examples from that very file and discuss how I approached certain daily routines.
Let’s start with the entry from just the beginning of the year 2013:
In the above picture we can see few things. For January 9th I would say it’s self explanatory, but the next day is more interesting. We can see that I obviously was running many tests in parallel, to do more work, but since there was a licence issue (don’t we all love those), I decided to run them one by one. Since these tests were related to very complex LTSSM protocol (part of PCIe), you can see how I wrote detailed explanations for each of them, so that the next day I can easily get back to it and resume my work. Remembering all those things was and still is very challenging. We were often going back and forth between these tests, so it was very important to keep track of everything.
In the next example you can see how I was running eight (let me repeat that – eight) simulations at the same time, so I obviously needed to keep the track which test is run in which folder. I remember that these tests were relativelly long, so multitasking of this scale was possible, but I never recommend anyone to debug eight things at the same time. 🙂
Many times I logged some very protocol-specific stuff, like packet format. This was very useful as whenever I got back to the similar problem, I was able to quickly recall what the format is:
Many times I logged some very protocol-specific stuff, like packet format. This was very useful as whenever I got back to the similar problem, I was able to quickly recall what the format is:
Writing about the problem I am solving helps me get more focused on it and I usually get more ideas flowing. Fast forward to today and I have got better and more precise at this practise of logging. Here is one of more recent examples:
By logging my work, I can easily remember what was the challenge in some of my previous tasks, what mistakes I made, what impacted my decision making, and so on. It helps me be more aware of what can go wrong and how to approach verification.
Conclusion
I could be providing examples all day long, but I want to give my thoughts why I find this process useful.
It helps me focus
Studies have shown that different areas of brain are active when we think about something and when we write about what we think. By explicitly writing down how I plan to execute certain task, I get more ideas flowing. In addition, I get to evalute my own ideas in real time.
I don’t need to remember anything
By writing down what I plan to do, how I did it, how certain protocol works or what customer asked me to do , I don’t need to remember anything. This frees up my memory and brain capacity for other things. Actually, and this is true story, years after I moved to a differnet project, colleague of mine who was still on that same project I left, approached me and consulted me about some issue “we had back then”. I didn’t need to think much – I opened my work log and we quickly located relevant issue and explanation for the problematic behavior. Years later!
It creates nice memories
While writing this article and reading through the old work logs, I actually revived many of the fond memories I have. It has reminded me how I was doing my work when I was a junor engineer and how I approached certain challenges. It allows me to observe my professional journey though the years and reflect on it.
What tools do you employ which help you in your daily work? Let know in the comments.
