Recently, I've been developing Winnie, a simple tool designed to help people celebrate their wins and milestones while working on big projects. I believe journaling is essential, especially for engineers, to stay motivated and focused on our goals.
As a software engineer early in my career, I'm passionate about coding, problem-solving, and building new things. However, like many of you, I've realized that solely focusing on coding in isolation can lead to being overlooked.
In my early months, I struggled to effectively communicate my accomplishments during standups, sprint reviews, or performance evaluations. This resulted in my performance being seen as just average after the first cycle, despite "having delivered a tremendous amount of code", and "having completed a tremendous amount of tasks".
To address this, I started documenting my daily achievements in a Google Doc, and I noticed significant changes.
Firstly, I became more productive. By taking time to refine my achievements daily, my updates during standups became more engaging. People started to acknowledge my work and offer constructive feedback that improved my efficiency.
For instance, I transformed a basic update like "Yesterday I fixed an issue in ticket 12. No blockers" into something like: "I was fixing the permission issue when publishing messages to the broker. After working with SRE team, we detected the incorrect service principal got injected into the container runtime. Today..." It became a meaningful story where everyone got interested and actually understood what was going on.
Secondly, having a documented record of my accomplishments proved invaluable during performance reviews. With managers overseeing multiple engineers, it's easy for them to lose track of individual contributions. Having concrete evidence at hand saved time and effort, and also improved my review result.
Lastly, documenting my wins allowed me to reflect on my progress, make necessary adjustments, and feel a sense of pride in my achievements. If I couldn't come up with some meaningful achievement for a few days in a row, I knew that something needed to be changed, so I reached out to peers and managers to get more meaningful tasks. In general, the habit of documenting and celebrating wins fosters a proactive and positive mindset.
Motivated by this experience, I created Winnie to enhance the journaling experience for others. With Winnie, you can easily record, view, and update achievements with just a click. Data is stored completely in your browser, and most importantly, no sign-in is required.
I invite you to try Winnie and experience its impact on your productivity and mindset. Your feedback will shape Winnie's evolution, ensuring it meets the needs of users.
Right now, I'm planning for a set of features for the next release:
- Tagging (for categorization)
- Searching for wins
- Exporting to PDF
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