u/darko_bacic

I've been prepping for a performance review and hit the usual wall — I genuinely couldn't remember what I'd shipped six months ago. My commit history was no help, because half my real work never lands in a commit.

So for one week I logged every meaningful thing I did, one line each, as it happened. A normal week looked like this:

• Reviewed a big Bloc migration PR — caught a Cubit that never got closed, would've leaked on every screen push. Didn't write a line of it.
• Lost a morning to an Android-14-only release crash (R8 stripped a model class). Fixed it, shipped a new build. Zero commits.
• Talked a designer out of a custom page transition so onboarding felt native on both platforms.
• Unblocked a teammate on iOS universal links — the AASA file was cached on Apple's CDN.
• Paired a new hire through their first platform channel (battery level from native).

Two of my most valuable days that week produced no code at all. If you judged the week by GitHub, it'd look empty — which is exactly the problem at review time.

The method, steal it (no tool required):

1. Log as you go, not at review time. One line, ~10 seconds, when it happens — notes file, Notion, whatever. The trick is doing it in the moment; nobody reconstructs six months accurately.
2. Capture what git can't: reviews, incidents, mentoring, store/release fights, design calls. Rule of thumb — if it took real effort and moved something, it counts, even with no diff.
3. Turn lines into review bullets with action → context → impact. "Fixed a bug" is invisible. "Fixed a silent retry bug dropping ~2% of uploads → cut support tickets 30%" does the work for you. Run your best 5–10 through that and half your self-review is written.

Question for the room: how do you all remember what you actually did by review/promo time — keep a running brag doc, or reconstruct it from PRs and Slack the week before? Curious what actually works for people.

(Disclosure, since it's relevant: doing this by hand annoyed me enough that I'm building a tiny app for it — happy to share if anyone wants, but the method above needs zero tools and that's the point.)

your commit graph only counts code. but half the job is reviews, debugging, mentoring, firefighting — and none of it shows up. so you end the week feeling like you did nothing, and review season turns into forensic archaeology.

i'm building dev.log: one screen, log what you did in ~10 seconds (/win, /ugh, /til, /mood), watch it light up like a github heatmap. free forever for manual logging; a Pro tier later lets AI do the typing + turn your history into a brag doc.

honest status: nothing's built yet. i'm gathering the first 100 devs who feel this problem before writing app code, so the people who are early actually shape it.

not trying to hard-sell — genuinely want to know: do you feel this? and what would make a log like this something you'd actually open every day?

https://preview.redd.it/foby512nfo8h1.png?width=2044&format=png&auto=webp&s=662c68dcceeb932c8ea67e2c627add69195335f7

Hey, I posted here a few months back about WonderWay — a screen-free audio story app for kids (STEM adventures, moral tales, choose-your-path stories). At that point we had 300 installs and $40 from pure ASO.

Quick update on where we are:

**What's working:**

- ASO is still our only reliable channel (slow but consistent organic installs)

- Parents who actually try it tend to stick — retention is decent once someone starts a story

- The 'no ads + no screen' angle resonates when we say it clearly

**What's not working:**

- TikTok. We've tried a few formats and haven't cracked it yet. The challenge is that our product is *audio* — hard to make a compelling video about something you're supposed to listen to. If anyone's solved this for audio/non-visual products I'd genuinely love to hear it.

- We're not converting the people who do visit the store page well enough. We think it's a messaging problem.

**What we just did:**

Spent time properly defining who we're actually building for and how to talk to them. Came up with a cleaner one-liner:

> *The screen-free audio story app that builds curious, kind, and focused kids — while giving parents a guilt-free break.*

Previously we were just saying 'audio stories for kids' which... doesn't say much.

**The core insight:** parents aren't buying stories for their kids. They're buying relief from the screen guilt spiral. We were marketing the product feature instead of solving the problem they feel every day at 5pm when they just need 30 minutes to make dinner.

Still early days. Still figuring out paid, influencers, and whether TikTok is even the right channel for a kids app. Happy to share more about the ASO side if useful — that's where most of our learning has been.

Anyone else building in the kids/family app space? Would love to compare notes.