I am a person who is very interested in personal development. Therefore, I would like to maintain a project database or diary, where I can list the special occurrences and experiences in the different projects.
Do you know any software which is dedicated to this task? (of course I can write it into a word file, but perhaps there are smarter solutions).
i installed trac for me :) Tickets are my todos, the wiki is for special occurences and experiences in projects..
What's wrong with pen and paper? I use plain A4 hardback notebooks to maintain logs. Seems to work OK.
I've started using Emacs org-mode 4 months ago. It's an outliner with tons of useful features. It allows to plan the project, track progress (for example, track time spent doing various tasks), link to source code, store notes related to tasks, and much more.
I've been keeping a technical diary in the form of an intranet blog for some time now and it's been working quite well for me. It allows me to record my daily activities, interesting links and project experiences.
What I find useful is that the blog engine makes it easy to search by tag, category, date, or keyword - so even if you have multiple projects on the go you can tag/catergorize them as you like. Also by making the blog available to your co-workers they can gain the benefit of your notes as well, and even add comments/further suggestions.
There are plenty of blog engines out there which are free/open source and extremely easy to setup (i use BlogEngine.Net along with Windows Live Writer)
If you are not keen on the idea of other people seeing the blog then I recommend using Evernote which is an awesome note keeping utility.
I guess the key thing is that you have to make it as easy as possible to use, otherwise you won't do it for very long :)
I've been using SmartSheet - a web based PM tool. It contains a discussion feature down to the task level...I've found this very helpful as far as a diary, noting updates, changes, etc.
If you only want to keep a diary, any blog system will please you. If like us you would like to do "pre-mortem" and frequent "post-mortem" this is a lot different.
In our case we use the already existing wiki and made a special section for this. We have different pages for different projects and split the pages with the recuring items. Anyone can edit it and add items, and we have an history just in case. At the end of each important milestone, each team meet to discuss, the list is completed with any missing items. Once this is done, the production team compile the result into something nice to read for posterity.
I like Microsoft's OneNote for this type of thing. Easy to jot things down, and very easy to grab screens or code snippets, web links, or just about anything else and organize into virtual notebooks.