What's a Brag Document?

Julia Evans explains it in her post: Get your work recognized.

We tend to forget the things we accomplish, the work we've done a few months ago, even that small API feature that you don't remember how you went about it matters. Why?

Because Impostor Syndrome is strong in our industry and this is a way for us to look it straight in the face and say: 'Not today.'

So how does it work?

You essentially create a text document in your favorite app and start writing! What worked for me is to follow a template (which will be at the end of the post).

The goal of the Brag Document is to list any work that you want to remember further along the year, in a daily or weekly basis, whatever works for you! It can be some code you've written, a nice post that helped you understand a concept, or just something like 'I wrote a nice code review and helped someone'!

And if your organization does performance reviews, this can help on having a clear picture of your progress so far. If they don't, then you can measure your own progress ;)

Motivation is to keep track of my daily work on my career in which I can later reflect upon it. Also, avoiding the feeling of fuzziness when looking back on my previous accomplishments.

Source: github repo of this document

Example!

I would like to leave my document as an example and encouragement for you to start your own! I personally follow a template I've created myself and I've been writing on it on a daily basis, since I've discovered that's what works best for me.

Here's the link http://tiny.cc/brag-document, this will take you to the Notion page.

Inside the link you'll find:

• The public Notion document in which I track my progress. This gets updated daily.
• A template to copy/modify to suit your needs.
• Milestones achieved.
• Useful links that help me become a better software developer.

And remember!

What gets measured, gets improved. - Chris Do

Thanks for reading!