A single, dated log of everything done, across all repository, in the process of building a full open system from the ground up.
Work on a project like this happens across many repos, often in parallel, over a long stretch of time. Without a single record:
- there's no easy way to see what happened on a given day across the whole project
- context and reasoning behind decisions gets lost once it scrolls out of a single repo's commit history
- anyone trying to follow along (including me) has to dig through commit logs in five different places
journal.md is the one place that answers "what happened, and where" for the whole project, day by day. It's meant to be read like a devlog: short, honest, and current, and not a polished writeup.
Entries live in a single file, journal.md, in reverse-chronological order (newest at the top, so the latest work is always visible without scrolling).
Each day gets a level-2 heading with the date (YYYY-MM-DD), followed by one bolded line per repo touched that day, describing what was done in it.
## 2026-08-07
**emilia** — some cursed program encountered
**jny** — also very much important work done
## 2026-08-06
**emilia** — started some very important work
**journal** — wrote initial README
A few conventions to keep it consistent:
- Repo names should match the actual repo name exactly, so they're easy to search for (
Ctrl+F "cpu-rtl"should find every day that repo was touched). - Keep each line to what was done, not general commentary, save deeper writeups (design notes, "why") for that repo's own README or docs.
- Optionally, link a commit or PR at the end of a line, e.g.
**jny** — fixed A20 line enable ([commit_n](../jny/commit/n)).