Weekly Notes: What to Write
You write one short note a week, in your course repo, at oim3690/logs/wk01.md through wk14.md. It takes a few minutes and it is the one thing in this course that runs every week, whatever else you happen to be building.
The note has four standing prompts:
- What you worked on
- What gave you trouble, and where you are still stuck
- Something new you picked up, in class or anywhere else
- Something you noticed about working with AI this week
Some weeks I will ask for something specific instead, tied to what actually happened in the room.
The one rule
Write what actually happened. A blank line beats an invented one.
A note that says "worked on the site, learned CSS, AI was helpful" is worth nothing to you in December, and it is obvious from a distance. A note that says "spent 40 minutes on a footer that would not stay at the bottom, turns out I had two elements fighting for the same space" is worth reading a year from now.
Ideas when a prompt feels empty
You do not need all of these. They are here for the weeks when you look at a heading and go blank.
On what you built
- What you built, fixed, or broke
- The thing that took far longer than you expected, and why
- A decision you made, and the option you turned down
- Something you shipped without fully understanding, and what you plan to do about it
On what changed for you
- The moment it clicked: something you could not do last week and can do now
- A question you still cannot answer
- Something you can use but could not explain out loud
- A bug that is still open
On other people's work
- Something you took from a classmate's project
- A site, a repo, or a piece of code worth stealing an idea from
- A question someone asked in class that you are still thinking about
- A tool or an idea from a lightning talk that you would try, with its link. Name the idea and leave out who gave the talk, because your repository is public.
On working with AI
- A prompt that worked far better than your first attempt, and what you changed
- Something the AI produced that you rewrote or threw away, with the commit
- Something it got right that surprised you
- A moment you could not tell whether the output was correct
On the week itself
- How the week actually felt
- A link worth keeping
- What you want to try next week
Format
Write it in Markdown, with headings and bullets. GitHub renders the file on the page, so a note with no formatting is a wall of text.
A starting file is on the course site: weekly-log.md.
How it is checked
Checkpoints look for the file, on time, with real content in it. Notes are checked by the commit date, so a week's note written three weeks later is not a note about that week. Write it before you leave on Thursday, or that evening at the latest.
Last updated: Thursday, 9/24/2026