“What did you work on today?” is a surprisingly difficult question.

We noticed this happening constantly while building Meridian.

Someone would ask for an update and we’d have to think:

“Wait… what did I actually do today?”

We could remember the main task.

But then we’d start reconstructing everything else:

“Oh right, I spent an hour debugging that.”

“And I reviewed that PR.”

“And there was that production issue.”

“And I spent 30 minutes figuring out why that test was failing.”

The problem wasn’t that we weren’t working.

The problem was that we weren’t keeping a good record of the work as it happened.

So we started using Meridian ourselves.

It watches the work happening across our development environment and builds a timeline automatically.

At the end of the day, we can just look at the timeline instead of trying to reconstruct the day from memory.

It’s a small problem, but we found ourselves dealing with it almost every single day.

That’s usually a good sign that something is worth building.