Weekly Notes: What to Write

You can write one short note a week, in your course repo, at oim3690/logs/wk01.md through wk14.md. It takes a few minutes.

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 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#

From Checkpoint 5 on, the note is optional and carries no points. When a session asks you to write something in a note, such as your prediction and each bug you found, that writing is part of the in-class exercise, and the checkpoint checks it with the exercise.

Last updated: Monday, 10/26/2026