On Retroactively Writing Project Logs

My biggest task in creating this website has been populating it with project and blog articles. I can list projects—completed and half-finished—going back more than ten years. I had assumed I would "simply remember" all the details and dig up photos to retroactively document the processes. Turns out, if you don't keep up with your design journals, that's a lot harder than it sounds.

Why make project logs?

Why am I doing all this in the first place? It's always felt like one of the best parts of creating stuff is sharing the stuff I create with people. I think that's a big part of my interest in biomedical engineering—being able not only to share but also to aid people's health. I suppose that's a quality of engineering in general.

Having a neat, accessible record of things I've worked on lets me easily share them. It also gives me a way to look back on what I've done for fun… or whenever I start to get on myself about being incompetent (this is helpful!). It's useful when applying for jobs or internships. Or bragging to other engineers. Or dating (maybe—I'll get back to you on the success of this).

And it's valuable to have a log of how I've solved problems in the past so that when similar ones come up again I am able to breeze through them. Hopefully it can help other engineers too.

A quick anecdote: my senior engineering project in highschool was building a D&D game table ^{[citation needed]}, and I was "forced" to submit weekly design journals. That was the least entertaining part of the project, as was evidenced by my frequent several-weeks late burst submissions. Yet, it turns out, having those design journals made it a breeze to create a design poster and presentation at the end of the semester. And, that project is going to be the easiest for me to mirror onto this website.

Why didn't I make project logs before?

Because it's less interesting than working on a project. That's really it. If I can grab some tools in my hands and build something, I am going to do that over sitting down and writing about what I have done and what I plan to do. What a young engineer mindset.

I know this because I dealt with it directly when I had not only my own brain but my beloved engineering teacher and robotics coach to encourage me. Of course design journals are less interesting than making, and of course logically I know why I need to do them anyway. External encouragement (and grades) is what it seemed to take for me. It's the same reason I used to do math homework due in two weeks instead of writing a literature essay due the next day. It's the same reason you doomscroll AI slop instead of going to sleep (well, if you are reading this website, maybe you exist at a higher level of being).

So how do I overcome this on my own? I don't really know yet. I have some ideas:

What I am doing to overcome this from now on?

• Don't start a new project until at least all progress is logged from existing ones
  • This glosses over the issue of having many simultaneous projects. That's something I think is all too familiar to engineers and is something other smart people have written about [todo link some]
  • The point is that if I make a smaller effort to document things before moving on, stuff gets documented!
• Log things as goals are met
  • Again, this assumes I acquire the discipline to set good goals before diving into a project and to stick with them. But if I can do that, this small step helps keep things documented
• Get people interested in my in-progress projects
  • If other people want to know what I'm doing, I will be more motivated to keep good records to share with them in real time. This could be family and friends or, more aspirationally, online strangers
• Lock money behind logging
  • I'll be honest, this is another purely personal discipline one. The idea is that I can't spend money on new parts until I have used and documented the last things I bought