I came upon the idea of a brag document a long time ago. Posts like this, spoke to me, because I've faced interviews in which I've been asked about cool things I had accomplished lately, but I couldn't remember them on the spot.
So a brag document makes a lot of sense.
The problem is I never remember to update it. So I built bragreminder.com.
I thought having a tool to remind me to write down my professional wins with really low friction would be a nice one-week-long project. And the perfect excuse to try a few things:
- Building something from scratch using Copilot
- Using Cloudflare for the first time
- Working with automated emails
- Owning one more domain. Who doesn't want another one, right?
So I've learned quite a bit, like how to burn 90% of your monthly premium Copilot tokens in under a week, and finally got a small project out there that I plan to use.
GitHub: https://github.com/davidballester/bragreminder.com
App: bragreminder.com
What have I learned about Copilot?
I've used it extensively in my job, but never gave it a try to build something from the ground up. And it excels at that.
However, you have to be careful. It won't always know the right answer, but that won't prevent it from giving you one, so it is up to your expertise to steer it in the right direction.
Different models give you different results. I loathed GPT models, but found Anthropic's Opus amazing. Be careful, though. As of today, it burns 3 times the amount of tokens the other models do.
I still kept a close eye on everything it added. I reviewed every line of code, manually tested everything, kept asking for refactors, do DRY things up and to minimize the amount of code. A couple of bugs I decided to fix myself after watching the agents go in circles around them without really grasping what the issue was.
But, overall, a really nice experience. If I had decided to write all this by myself, it would have taken me 3 times as long. And for a side project like this, I probably would have lost interest before completing it.
Looking for feedback
Give bragreminder.com a go, and let me know what you think.
And, as a preofessional on the sector with 15+ years of experience, don't use bragreminder.com if you don't feel like it, but keep a brag document. It will be quite useful, even to fight the impostor syndrome that always lurks in the shadows.
And let me know your thoughts on building with Copilot and having to nudge it in the direction you feel is correct, even when it insists on something else.
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