Dear Diary, so far so good—The application works perfectly

Approaching a development framework for the first time is like embarking on a journey, marked by mistakes, solutions, design choices, and key considerations. Tracking these aspects, much like keeping a diary, helps programmers understand implementations, revisit errors, and plan future strategies. Inspired by this analogy, we present Dear Diary, a tool integrated into the IDE that enables programmers to document their development journey. The tool allows developers to capture multiple versions of a project, functional or not, and to add rich explanations in their own words. These explanations can refer to all the components of a project, encompassing files, code, terminal commands, and dependencies, to create a holistic approach that provides richer context for understanding and learning from project evolution. A user study with 18 participants examined how Dear Diary was used during a framework-learning task, focusing on the capture phase of the development journey. Results showed that participants used the tool throughout the programming task to capture diverse forms of contextual knowledge linked to their development activity, while reporting positive perceptions of its usability, relevance, and potential usefulness.