Engineering Notebook & Decision Journal

Seven fields that say where you are in the loop, and a journal of decisions with the evidence, the alternatives and the moment to revisit. Everything stays in this browser. The habit is the point: a decision without written evidence is a preference, and a preference cannot be revisited.

ProblemUnderstandRequirementsConstraintsUnknownsDecompositionSmallest StepModelExperimentObserveDebugLearnIterate

Notebook

Overwrite as you go. It describes now, not history — the journal keeps the history.

Decision journal

One entry per decision that would be expensive to reverse.

No decisions recorded

Add an entry when you choose something you could not cheaply undo — a data model, a boundary, a provider.

What a good entry looks like

The store's cart-persistence decision. Notice that every field could be checked by someone else, and that the last one names the evidence that would change the decision.

Export

Plain text, for a README, a pull request, or the next person.