Picked up the Personal Workbench development from Sunday, with the main focus on properly testing the diary publishing process and making sure the backup system works.
Also had another interesting result from the automated opportunity scan, and started experimenting with a more systematic way of recording my development activity.
Opportunity scan
The scan identified a Systems Manager (IT, Data & AI) position through Signature Recruitment, based around Weston-super-Mare.
It scored the role at 8.6/10 and generated a tailored CV, cover letter and evidence map. Everything was saved to Google Drive.
The position involves integrating operational systems, data management, reporting, automation and AI, so there's quite a good match with some of my recent work.
The application documents still needed reviewing, particularly the claims around enterprise IT management and Microsoft systems. No application had been submitted by the end of Monday.
Personal Workbench and WordPress
Continued the Notes from the Workbench implementation.
On Sunday we'd established that most of the diary pipeline was built, but it hadn't actually been tested against a real WordPress installation.
Configured the local nicheclever.test installation to support the publishing connection and generated an Application Password for the dedicated diary account.
Ran a series of real HTTP requests against the diary plugin, covering authentication, creating entries, detecting duplicates, withdrawing entries and rejecting invalid submissions.
All the expected responses came back.
Also checked that the plugin installed on the local site matched the repository version.
That established that the WordPress publishing connection worked at the API level.
The next planned step was a manual test: recording a real voice note, running it through Ollama, reviewing the resulting entry and approving it for publication.
Backup and recovery
Did some more substantial work on Personal Workbench's backup system.
Created a verification script that exercises the actual backup executable against seven different recovery scenarios.
One of those exposed a real problem.
Restoring onto a completely fresh installation could fail because the software assumed that part of the database structure already existed.
Fixed that and added a destination option to the backup tool, making it possible to restore into a clean directory.
Ran the seven scenarios again, and all passed.
The complete Personal Workbench test suite finished with 870 out of 870 tests passing.
A couple of smaller checks remained, particularly confirming that backup archives don't contain secrets and dealing with scheduled tasks after a restore.
Git and development records
Tidied up the repository and decision history.
The ticker-diary plugin hadn't previously had a Git commit, so committed the existing source properly.
Also found duplicated decision identifiers in Personal Workbench's development register. Corrected those, updated the references and brought the documentation into line with the implementation.
Prepared a manual acceptance checklist and updated the Notes from the Workbench context pack with the completed work and next-session instructions.
Developing the professional journal
Also started experimenting with whether I could reconstruct a useful daily account of my work from the records already being generated by the various systems.
The first attempt used the Google Drive context packs to assemble an account of Monday's activity, including the Workbench development and the opportunity scan.
It worked reasonably well, but the writing was too explanatory. I wanted something more like an informal workshop journal: what I'd been working on, what had changed, what had been tested and what remained outstanding.
Revised the format to make it more direct and conversational.
One important decision was to record agent-assisted development as my work, rather than constantly describing what Claude, Codex or ChatGPT had done independently. The agents are part of my working process, and their actions are generally undertaken under my direction.
Also started looking back at Sunday to give Monday's work some context.
That began to expose a more interesting problem. A record built primarily from context-pack files and their modification times doesn't necessarily capture everything that happened. Some substantial work took place in conversations without producing a corresponding document or commit.
Future reconstructions would need to draw on those conversations as well as the development records.
The experiment had already produced useful material, although the method needed further refinement.
Current state
By Monday's end, the Workbench diary publishing connection had been tested against the local WordPress API, and the backup and recovery process had passed its verification tests.
The next planned step was the full manual voice-note publishing test.
The opportunity scan had produced another application pack for review.
The professional journal was beginning to take shape. Improving the reconstruction process, so that it captured the work rather than just recently updated files, was the next task.
Export and share