Most of what happens in a tech course evaporates as it happens — programs get fixed and the broken versions vanish, and with them the best evidence of your learning. Your journal is the part that stays: the running record where every crashed build, pasted traceback, and slow breakthrough turns into something you can look back through and actually see changing. In this course, the journal is the portfolio — the place broken builds become visible growth.
The hub is Dev Journal. The pages below support it, and the judging page beside it, roughly in the order you meet them:
| Page | When you need it |
|---|---|
| Your First Entry | Week one, facing a blank page |
| What a Strong Entry Looks Like | Once the habit exists |
| Judging Your Own Work | A period or two before anything is due |
| Journal Checklist | Before each unit’s collection |
| Showing Growth | Mid-course, when old entries become evidence |
| Final Reflection | The last week, reading the whole record |
Written forwards, read backwards
Entries take ten minutes and feel small. The value arrives months later, when Showing Growth calls the you who started this course as a witness — and that only works if the person who wrote it did so honestly.