Brag template

2024-03-01

TEMPLATE

Goals for this year:

List your major goals here! Sharing your goals with your manager & coworkers is really nice because it helps them see how they can support you in accomplishing those goals!

Goals for next year

If it’s getting towards the end of the year, maybe start writing down what you think your goals for next year might be.

Projects

For each one, go through:

Remember: don’t forget to explain what the results of you work actually were! It’s often important to go back a few months later and fill in what actually happened after you launched the project.

Collaboration & mentorship

Examples of things in this category:

Helping others in an area you’re an expert in (like “other engineers
regularly ask me for one-off help solving weird bugs in their CSS” or
“quoting from the C standard at just the right moment”) Mentoring interns /
helping new team members get started Writing really clear emails/meeting
notes Foundational code that other people built on top of Improving
monitoring / dashboards / on call Any code review that you spent a
particularly long time on / that you think was especially important
Important questions you answered (“helped Risha from OTHER_TEAM with a lot
of questions related to Y”) Mentoring someone on a project (“gave Ben advice
from time to time on leading his first big project”) Giving an internal talk
or workshop

Design & documentation

List design docs & documentation that you worked on

Design docs: I usually just say “wrote design for X” or “reviewed design for
X” Documentation: maybe briefly explain the goal behind this documentation
(for example “we were getting a lot of questions about X, so I documented it
and now we can answer the questions more quickly”)

Company building

This is a category we have at work – it basically means “things you did to help the company overall, not just your project / team”. Some things that go in here:

Going above & beyond with interviewing or recruiting (doing campus
recruiting, etc) Improving important processes, like the interview process
or writing better onboarding materials

What you learned

My friend Julian suggested this section and I think it’s a great idea – try listing important things you learned or skills you’ve acquired recently! Some examples of skills you might be learning or improving:

how to do performance analysis & make code run faster internals of an
important piece of software (like the JVM or Postgres or Linux) how to use a
library (like React) how to use an important tool (like the command line or
Firefox dev tools) about a specific area of programming (like localization
or timezones) an area like product management / UX design how to write a
clear design doc a new programming language

It’s really easy to lose track of what skills you’re learning, and usually when I reflect on this I realize I learned a lot more than I thought and also notice things that I’m not learning that I wish I was. Outside of work

This can also include other non-career-related things you’re proud of, if that feels good to you! Some people like to keep a combined personal + work brag document.

General prompts

If you’re feeling stuck for things to mention, try:

If you were trying to convince a friend to come join your company/team, what
would you tell them about your work? Did anybody tell you that you did
something well recently?