Emanuele Viola started a new series of posts which is related to the research life-stories project. In his words:
“the series “behind the paper” collects snapshots of the generation of papers. For example, did you spend months proving an exciting bound, only to discover it was already known? Or what was the key insight which made everything fit together?
Records of this baffling process are typically expunged from research publications. This is a place for them. The posts will have a technical component.”
Windows On Theory 
After a year of working on a paper, which started when I was an intern at MSR, one of the authors suggested that we should start recording video outtakes (like in movies). More seriously, sometimes logs like these may be of great value for the researchers following up. Polymath projects let us see the research unfold. Sharing SVN/Git repositories could do something similar, but it doesn’t sound very convenient.