Example: a weekly progress log

This is a placeholder showing one format that works well for progress logs. Rewrite it with real content and delete this line. The structure below — question, attempt, result, next step — is worth keeping: it’s fast to write weekly, and it stays readable months later when you’ve forgotten the details.

The question

[What were you actually trying to find out this week? One or two sentences. Being specific here is what makes the post worth re-reading later.]

For context: [the minimum background a reader outside your group needs — what the apparatus does, what the measurement is]. The problem is that [the specific failure mode or bottleneck].

What I tried

[The approach, at the level of detail you’d tell a labmate at the whiteboard.]

The model is a [architecture] trained on [data — how much, collected how], minimising

\[\mathcal{L} = \sum_{i} \left( y_i - \hat{y}_i \right)^2 + \lambda R(\theta)\]

where [define your terms]. Training details: [optimiser, learning rate, epochs, hardware, wall-clock time].

# The bit that mattered, not the whole script.
model = build_model(n_features=X.shape[1], hidden=(64, 64))
history = model.fit(
    X_train, y_train,
    validation_data=(X_val, y_val),
    epochs=200,
    callbacks=[EarlyStopping(patience=20, restore_best_weights=True)],
)

What happened

[The result. Include the number, and include the error bar.]

Configuration	[Metric]	Note
Baseline	[value]	[what it is]
This week	[value]	[what changed]

[Then the honest part: what’s still wrong, what you don’t trust yet, which control you haven’t run. Posts that only report wins are much less useful to your future self than ones that record the doubts.]

What’s next

[Concrete next step]
[Another one]
[The control experiment you know you’re avoiding]

Open questions

[Things you’d genuinely like an answer to. If anyone ever reads this blog, this is the section that gets you an email.]