Career & Leadership › Career Growth

Brag Document

A running record of your accomplishments.

Also known as: brag doc, brag sheet, accomplishments log, work log, achievements document

A brag document is a running list of what you’ve accomplished, kept just for you. You add to it every week or two, in plain words, with evidence. It sounds self-indulgent, but it solves real problems.

Why keep one

• Memory is bad. At review time, you won’t remember what you did in March. Your manager won’t either.
• Fair credit for your work, especially work that’s invisible: unblocking others, fixing flaky tests, writing docs, reviewing code, mentoring.
• Promotions and raises need evidence of impact (“here’s what I did and what changed”), not just effort.
• Confidence. On days when you feel you aren’t making progress, or with impostor syndrome, the list proves otherwise.
• Easier résumé and interview answers.
• Self-awareness: patterns in what you enjoy, and where you’re growing.

What to put in

For each item: what you did, why it mattered, and the result, with a link where possible.

## June
- Fixed the checkout timeout that caused ~2% of payment failures (PR #412).
  Added retries with backoff and a regression test. Failures dropped to near zero the next week.
- Wrote the on-call runbook for the payments service; used successfully in last week's incident.
- Reviewed 18 PRs, mostly for the new onboarding team.
- Presented the caching proposal at the architecture sync; the team adopted it.
- Learned: first time leading a deployment; wrote up what I'd do differently.

Include:

• Shipped work and measurable results (latency, errors, hours saved, users affected).
• Collaboration: reviews, mentoring, helping other teams.
• Things you led or improved: processes, tests, docs, tooling.
• Learning: new skills and what you’d do next.
• Feedback you received, including kind words from colleagues.
• Problems you handled (incidents, tough debugging).

Habits

• Update it regularly, for example every Friday. Five minutes beats a panic reconstruction.
• Save links and numbers while they’re fresh.
• Be specific and honest. “Improved performance” says nothing. “Cut the report query from 12 s to 1.5 s by adding an index” says plenty.
• Include setbacks you learned from, but keep the document mostly accomplishments.
• Use it for one-on-ones, reviews and career conversations.

Related to, but different from, an engineering journal, which is for thinking and learning. A brag document is the highlights reel.