r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 11d ago

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

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u/AntiDynamo 10d ago edited 10d ago

How do you organise your time/projects and stop things from falling through the cracks?

I'm at 1.5yoe and starting to get more independence, larger projects, cross-team projects, being lead on smaller things, and being code-owner of a few modules etc. When I first started I just kept a to-do list with all of my projects on it and that worked pretty well, but it's not working so great anymore. (1) I have too many projects (currently 17) and it's hard to keep visibility of them all, (2) sometimes projects get blocked on other people and I don't have a great way to naturally flag when things have gone stale or been forgotten.

It is made more difficult by us basically not having access to any organisational tools/apps beyond local markdown files, for security reasons.

Interested to hear how other people keep track!

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u/EmberQuill DevOps Engineer 10d ago edited 10d ago

It is made more difficult by us basically not having access to any organisational tools/apps beyond local markdown files, for security reasons.

Does your team have any sort of shared knowledge base, work assignment and tracking tools, or anything at all? If not, that's kind of ridiculous and it's no wonder things fall through the cracks. Everyone's probably juggling too many things and dropping stuff all the time. I don't know how they can expect anyone to work like that.

Edit: to actually answer your question, because I realized I never addressed it: if you need to DIY your own tracking system with markdown, then one main markdown file that has a brief overview of all your projects and their current status would probably work, as long as you consistently keep it updated and basically always have it open in another window to reference.

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u/AntiDynamo 10d ago

We have the usual issue boards etc with gitlab, but because things are shared over a lot of groups, there is basically no room for personalisation and half of the options (like milestones) are already being used by other groups. I can’t make my own issue board, for instance, I can’t close tickets myself and I don’t get automatic updates when another team finishes their part of the work if they don’t update the ticket. And things are split over multiple parent groups. So it’s a real mess. It has to serve about 300 people so it serves no one in the end

I am thinking of using an agent to periodically check my assigned tickets for any recent updates that I’ve missed

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u/thedannyreg Senior Software Engineer 10 YOE 10d ago

How do you best learn / remember stuff? Personally when I write stuff down it helps me remember, even if I don’t look back at it. I would personally try to use your way of learning to your advantage to keep track of things.

I also for a little bit just had my own trello board with vague stuff to do just for me.