Annual Reminder: Brag About Your Work

I work with one of the authors of 7 More Languages in 7 Weeks. Yesterday, I did a drive-by code review on her pull request, suggesting we implement the Strategy Pattern instead of the mishmash of .includes and === checks everywhere in our codebase.

It's starting to look like we need a Strategy pattern (?) for region, such that we can just do:

RegionStrategy.for(currentState.region).hasAwesomeFeature();

Instead of the current approach

    const regionsWithFeature = ['OR', 'TX', 'PI'];
    return regionsWithFeature.includes(currentState.region);
// and other includes or ===, etc variants all over our code

She replied, "Awesome idea, I'm going to implement it."

I was privately gushing to my friends about how awesome it felt to be seen by "a great". But I didn't want to seem braggy and pompous to the greater dev community, so I didn't write an article about it.

This morning, I examined myself -- why not write the article? Why hide? Why suppress the feeling of being validated? After all, this is one of my whys for being a dev: the recognition by my peers that I know my stuff.

Bragging

It is January again, the start of another 6 month cycle. A performance cycle just ended, and many of you were asked to write a self-assessment. What did you achieve in the past 6 months? Did you have anything to write?

Here's a tip from my favorite manager: Keep a Brag Document.

It wasn't an original thought, and many have written about it.

Julia Evans - Get Your Work Recognized
r/webdev - why a brag doc is indespensable
r/ExperiencedDevs
hackerone - Why I Keep A Brag Document
Fountain Institute - Keeping Track of Your Accomplishments

Takeaway

Don't be shy. Be proud of your work. Remind yourself why you're doing what you do, and why you love doing this.