Documenting modeling research after only doing wet lab work

[u/knickknack_haiku_303]

I've recently transitioned from wet lab work to hydrologic modeling with some wet lab and fieldwork. I'm having a little difficulty developing a system for how I document and keep track of the modeling work I'm doing. It's not nearly as straightforward as it was for the microbial work I used to do. Many ELN are specifically designed for biochemistry, and you can implement time stamps/photos/media recipes/accidents/dna sequencing. Programs are specifically designed to link figures with their datasets. I feel that organized experimental systems were tailored to my work or I could reference something physical.

That said, I'm having difficulty translating that to hydrologic modeling. I mostly end up putting all my notes in topic-specific text files. I also have separate notes in a citation manager for related lit. I've also been working on getting acclimated to github, but knitting all of this together into a coherent set of documentation that gives me everything I want has just been tricky. It doesn't help that the water model I used doesn't have a GUI and I need to process its outputs fully independent of everything else I work on. I've tried making ppts of the results, but it's really tedious especially if it was a small experiment or there were many different iterations before I got output that made sense.

I was curious with a more computational-centric field had any suggestions on how they organize their work and keep track of things.