Starting Point
Exactly 10 years after my first day at work, this is the starting point and the reason I decided to begin a logbook, a record of growth that was never properly documented.
Exactly 10 years after my first day at work, this is the starting point and the reason I decided to begin a logbook, a record of growth that was never properly documented.
Today, August 15, 2026, marks exactly ten years since I started working, and I’ve just realized how hard those ten years are to trace back.
I still remember the first day. August 15, 2016, starting as a Scientific Journal Publishing Staff at FEB Unpas. Back then, the work was simple, mostly about publishing academic journals.
Ten years later, that job still exists, but it looks nothing like it used to. I now manage five journals at once, Trikonomika, JRAK, JRBM, JRIE, and Brainy. The role isn’t singular either. Across all five, I work as an OJS admin, a layouter, and a graphic designer, including handling the front-end display.
But office work turned out to be only one part of the story. Since 2019, I’ve also worked as a freelancer, starting on Freelancer.com as a graphic designer. From there it grew into other projects outside the office, managing the FEB Unpas Economics Website, the DIM Unpas Website, and the Jahe Padjajaran Website.
And now, on top of all that, I’m building dikiachmadp.work on my own. Not a project for anyone else, just a place to learn web development, showcase a portfolio, and experiment.
Looking further back, this isn’t really where it started. I graduated from a Multimedia vocational high school, then went on to study Visual Communication Design at Universitas Teknologi Bandung, and only finished my degree this year, in 2024. So I began purely as a graphic designer. Even my first freelance project was just about graphic design.
From that point, everything expanded outward. From design, I started dealing with OJS. From OJS, to websites, hosting, domains, databases. Then to certifications, DOI, Crossref, and various other digital needs that had nothing to do with graphic design at all.
Looking back, one pattern kept repeating throughout that journey. I taught myself, every time I ran into a problem that needed solving.
I never stuck to one field from the start and became an expert in it. What happened was the opposite. There was a problem, there was a need at work, and from there I learned whatever was required to solve it.
The way I learned varied too. Sometimes through YouTube videos, sometimes through conversations with AI, but most often by learning while working directly on a related project, learning by doing. Even now, the pattern hasn’t changed. There are several things I’m learning at the same time, data analysis, data science, AI engineering, AI context, AI agents, and a few more I’ve honestly forgotten to name one by one.
I’ve also come to notice that I’m someone who thinks in structures. I often want work to be systematic, planned from start to output. Even though reality doesn’t always turn out that neatly, my thinking still leans that way.
Office hours run Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Outside of that, I often use rest time and days off to learn or finish other work. Not because I have to, but because there’s simply a lot I still want to dig deeper into.
The consequences are real too. There have been times my head felt too full, my focus scattered, from trying to get too many things done in too little time, and in a structured way. That’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s part of the reality of these ten years.
What made me pause today is the realization that ten years have passed, and I don’t actually know, in detail, what I’ve been through.
I remember the broad pattern. But the details, which project finished when, which lesson came from which problem, are all scattered, never properly recorded.
I realized that not every piece of work or learning can be traced back to its results, if it was never documented in the first place.
That’s why, at this ten-year mark, I decided to start a logbook.
Not to show anything off to anyone. But so that, going forward, I have documentation that’s organized, that can be checked, that can be counted, that can be looked at and compared.
So that later, say ten years from now, exactly on August 15, 2036, I can open this record and actually know how much I’ve grown, how far I’ve come, what milestones I’ve passed, and what projects I’ve completed along the way.
This piece is that starting point.
Not an achievement, not something meant to be shown off. Just a marker, that starting today, what I do and what I learn will begin to be recorded.
I don’t know what this logbook will look like ten years from now. But I know that without starting to record it today, I’ll end up in the same position I’m in now, trying to remember something that should have already been saved.
What I Learned
- A starting point rarely determines where something will go, what matters more is the willingness to keep learning every time a new problem shows up.
- Adaptability and self-directed learning get used far more often than deep expertise in a single field.
- Without documentation, real growth can feel like it never happened at all.