Have you ever finished a busy week and thought, “Wait—what did I actually do?”
You know you worked. You know it mattered. But when it comes to communicating that impact—to a boss, a peer, or even just to yourself—it’s surprisingly hard to recall the shape of your effort. That’s what this project set out to fix.

We built a personal work log—not for tracking time, but for tracking accomplishment.
It’s a Google Sheets-based tool designed to help you answer one very powerful question:

What did I actually get done?

I've been pretty lax about working in a structured and organized way in my personal projects. Some of that has to do with life just kind of being a bummer lately. Unemployment is hard. But it also has to do with I just got into some sections of work that felt very unstructured and exploratory. I knew roughly where I wanted to get to, but I didn't know how to get there until I did a lot of learning and made a bunch of mistakes. Now, arguably, that's exactly the kind of stuff I should have been documenting. But doing it took a lot of my time and energy. Today, we're where we are, and there's no use pretending we're somewhere else.

It's been a long while. I haven't been posting, and virtually nothing has changed here at IainDavis.dev. But I haven't been idle either. Since I last was regularly updating, I made several decisions that have taken a good long while to carry out, and I abandoned some structure and communication while I was doing it. In retrospect, it was maybe unwise, but at the time it felt like quite enough to be dealing with all the things I was dealing with and also be doing the learning I needed to do to implement the changes I wanted.

Brief update to indicate some of the work I've done here in the last few days:

Hello, readers.

Nothing substantive about software development in this post, just a note to explain that I've had some upheaval in my personal life that has meant a significant interruption to the work I'm doing here. I expect to be resuming work here full-speed in the coming days, and picking up my job search where I left off.

Thanks for your understanding.

Over the past few days, we've built an automated system to streamline the creation of personalized cover letters using Google Apps Script. This integration automates the process of generating, storing, and accessing cover letters directly from a Google Sheets spreadsheet.

Key Accomplishments​

• Efficient Cover Letter Creation: Users can now generate cover letters with a single click, eliminating manual editing.
• Automated Document Management: Documents are automatically organized in Drive for easy access and tracking.
• User-Friendly Integration: A custom menu in Google Sheets makes it simple to trigger the entire process without needing to handle any code.

It's been a while since I posted here!

Actually, I posted here about a week ago about some of the things I was working on with Nova, but I wrote it in a bit of a rush, and I hated that blog post. It was disorganized and the content didn't really relate to the title at all, so I deleted it.

Since then, this week and a goodly chunk of last week have been all about producing content for this here website.

Streamlining the Deployment Pipeline​

Today, we took a major step toward automating the deployment of this site, eliminating manual steps and reducing the risk of errors.

Now, every pull request (PR) generates a preview build, and every merge to the main branch automatically triggers a production deployment. This new setup speeds up the process, ensures consistency, and minimizes the chances of mistakes.

Today, we focused on streamlining our automated preview deployment process for PRs, ensuring that each pull request includes a live preview of the Docusaurus site, Storybook components, and test reports.

The Challenge​

The main goal was to automate the deployment of a fully functional preview for every PR, complete with Docusaurus builds, Storybook, and test results. This meant dealing with dynamic URLs, managing build artifacts, and ensuring everything worked in harmony.

Why This Matters​

Automating the preview process means changes to the site are instantly available for review, speeding up development and reducing the chance of bugs. This allows us to deliver updates faster while keeping quality high.

Automating Test Reporting with Vitest and Istanbul​

As part of our commitment to ensuring high-quality code, we've set up an automated testing and reporting workflow using Vitest, Istanbul, and XUnit Viewer. Here’s a quick overview of how we made that happen.

Choosing the Right Tools​

We opted for:

• Vitest: A fast testing framework tailored for projects using Vite and TypeScript.
• Istanbul: A comprehensive code coverage tool, ensuring detailed metrics like branch, function, and statement coverage.
• XUnit Viewer: A simple way to convert XML test results into clean, shareable HTML reports.