Journaling your progress

Journaling! You’ve probably seen this term thrown around here and there. What is it?

Journaling is a way you can keep track of your progress while working on your project! It usually involves creating a JOURNAL.md file in the root of your repository, and then taking short notes on what you did each day!

Here’s an example journal entry for reference!

Journaling isn’t just useful for Hack Club projects, but it gives you something to look back long after you’ve finished your project! It’s also a great way to share your journey with other people who might be interested in your project!

Things you can journal:

• Time spent designing your project in software like KiCAD, Fusion360, etc!
• Time spent working on art for your project!
• Time spent researching, esp. referencing datasheets!

Things you can’t journal:

• Time spent watching YouTube videos on your project (I know it’s technically research - doesn’t count!)

Some extra journaling tips:

• Try to make it less of a log of purely “I did X and Y” and include interesting things you came across! Weird quirks in a specific chip, cool inspo you came across, etc!
• Images are worth a lot! Try to add a lot of images and avoid walls of text. It makes it much easier to convey information.

If you’re using VSCode, one plugin I recommend is Image Paste CDN. It allows you to paste images from your clipboard and have the automatically uploaded to Hack Club’s storage, which means you don’t have to store the images locally!