Eating dogfood 1000 times

cli
jot
python
uv
Author

Matt Dray

Published

May 31, 2026

A cartoon brain with a thought bubble containing another brain.

tl;dr

I wrote and used my own CLI tool over 1000 times. What did I learn?

One-shot jot

I’ve written about jot before: my very simple and opinionated Python command-line tool for jotting down little timestamped notes to myself.

In an open terminal I can just:

jot "put one of the new coversheets on the TPS reports"

And it gets automatically prepended to a text file with the date and time.

Rinse and repeat throughout the day.

A jot of bother

Regular readers know that I make stuff and… move on.

Sike! I’ve actually been using this one a whole bunch.

In fact, I’ve been jotting things down every work day since August 2025 and have banked well over 1000 jottings.

But has it actually been useful?

Forget me jot

I have a leaky brain.

This causes a problem when I try to write weeknotes and timesheets. I also struggle to reflect on my achievements, which is particularly pertinent with my upcoming annual appraisal.

So I’ve been consistently jotting down each of my tasks as I go along, like ‘released version 1.0 of the package’ and ‘joined a call with morag to discuss the app’1. It takes mere seconds.

Crucially, I record little interactions that often fall through the cracks. Which are often the things that actually matter to me and to my colleagues (as humans).

I’ve also used it to record unsolicited feedback. Turns out I’ve been useful to people. Who knew? I certainly didn’t before I started writing these things down.

Along the way I’ve been making heavy use of jot’s options like --list and --search (with --date-from and --date-to) to look for patterns and isolate time periods2.

In the PyPIline

I started developing jot to learn ‘how to Python’ and write CLIs. I think that’s a success, but where next?

Well, I’ve formalised its existence by uploading it to the Python Package Index (PyPI) to make it’s more readily available.

You can now find it as jot-cli on PyPI, as of version 0.3.0. Yes, you have to install ‘jot-cli’ rather than ‘jot’, because the name is already taken on PyPI. But the command still remains jot in the terminal3.

You could install4 with uv5:

uv tool install jot-cli

Then, to upgrade:

uv tool upgrade jot-cli

The development version is available from GitHub like:

uv tool install git+https://github.com/matt-dray/jot

Note that the GitHub repo is still called ‘jot’ despite it having to be called ‘jot-cli’ on PyPI6.

Thnks fr th Mmrs

Right now it works for me, which is the bottom line.

I know some others have had a go and found it useful too. Thanks in particular to:

  • Olivier for submitting code to let the list of jottings to be filtered by date
  • my work colleagues (especially Fran who have provided feedback in our ‘sidequests and suport’ sessions.
  • Adriana for blue-sky thinking (but mostly for listening to me ramble on about it)

I want functionality to remain simple, so future updates will mostly be about improving the underlying code and possibly the user interface.

I have, however, been developing an option to upload the file to a GitHub gist as backup. But maybe that’s too radical.

That’s yer jot

So, is jot a world-beating bit of software? No, there’s plenty of similar and more powerful tools out there7.

And has the dogfood been delicious? Aye, gourmet, and I’ll continue to chow down.

jot "wrote a blog post about jot's release to PyPI"

Environment

Session info 
[project]
name = "2026-05-31-dogfood-1000"
version = "0.1.0"
requires-python = ">=3.12"
dependencies = []

Footnotes

  1. Not actual colleagues.↩︎

  2. You could, for example, ask generative AI to pull out topics for you, but I quite like to eyeball it.↩︎

  3. Awkwardly, there’s an inbuilt macOS tool called jot, so you may get a nameclash. Most likely the installed tool will take precedence over the inbuilt one when you type jot, but you could set an alias to avoid this. I did think about changing the name to something else entirely, but ‘jot’ works well.↩︎

  4. Note that it has to be installed as a ‘tool’ becuase it’s intended for command-line use; its’ not a Python package (though you could use it one if you wanted).↩︎

  5. Non-uv users may prefer to use pipx.↩︎

  6. For consistency, I may eventually change the name of the repo to ‘jot-cli’ too.↩︎

  7. The most interesting thing I’ve seen recently for note-taking (and much more) is nb.↩︎

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