Picture this: it's performance review season. Your manager asks you to summarize your accomplishments from the last six months. You open a blank text box and stare at it. You know you did good work. You shipped features. You fixed gnarly bugs. You unblocked your teammates at least a dozen times. But the details? Gone. Evaporated into the daily blur of standups and Slack threads.
So you write something vague, like "contributed to the payments redesign," and hope your manager remembers the rest.
They don't.
This scenario plays out in thousands of companies every review cycle. And it's the single biggest reason talented people get passed over for promotions they deserve.
The fix is embarrassingly simple: write things down as they happen.
That's a brag document.
A brag document is just a running log
A brag document (sometimes called a "hype doc" or "achievement log") is a personal record of your professional accomplishments. Every time you ship something, solve a problem, receive praise, or learn something hard, you write a quick note.
Not a polished essay. Not a LinkedIn post. Just a few sentences: what happened, why it mattered, and any concrete results.
Here's what a real entry might look like:
Migrated payment processing to Stripe Led the migration from our legacy payment provider to Stripe, reducing failed transaction rate from 4.2% to 0.3%. Coordinated with 3 teams over 6 weeks. Zero downtime during cutover.
That took 30 seconds to write. But six months from now, when you need to justify a promotion or update your resume, that entry is gold.
Why most people don't keep one (and why they should)
The concept is not new. Julia Evans wrote about brag documents back in 2019, and the idea has been circling engineering communities ever since. Yet most people still don't do it.
The reasons are predictable:
- "I'll remember the important stuff." No, you won't. Research on memory shows we forget roughly 70% of new information within 24 hours. After six months, you're reconstructing, not remembering.
- "My manager sees my work." Maybe. But your manager has 8 to 15 other reports, their own deliverables, and a dozen competing priorities. They physically cannot track everything you do.
- "It feels like bragging." The name is unfortunate. This isn't about self-promotion. It's about self-documentation. Doctors keep patient records. Lawyers keep case files. You should keep a record of your professional output.
Five things a brag document does for your career
1. Performance reviews write themselves
This is the obvious one. When review time comes, you don't start from scratch. You open your brag document, scan the last quarter's entries, and pick the highlights. What used to be a dreaded two-hour exercise becomes a 20-minute copy-and-edit job.
2. Promotion cases get concrete
"I think I'm ready for senior engineer" is a feeling. "I led 3 cross-team projects, mentored 2 junior developers, reduced deploy time by 40%, and handled on-call for the highest-traffic service" is evidence. A brag document gives you the receipts.
3. You catch your own growth patterns
After a few months of entries, patterns emerge. Maybe you're drawn to infrastructure problems. Maybe you keep volunteering for cross-team coordination. Maybe your best work happens when you pair with designers. These patterns are career signals, and they tell you where to lean in.
4. You're always interview-ready
Job searching while employed is stressful enough without trying to remember specific accomplishments from two years ago. With a brag document, your resume bullets and STAR-method stories are pre-written. You just polish and submit.
5. You build confidence through evidence
Imposter syndrome feeds on vagueness. When you can scroll through months of concrete accomplishments, the "I'm not good enough" voice gets quieter. The evidence is right there.
How to actually maintain one
The biggest risk with a brag document is abandoning it after week two. Here's how to make it stick:
Write entries the same day. Don't batch. Don't plan to "catch up on Friday." When something happens, whether you deploy a feature, get positive feedback in a PR, or debug a production incident, open your brag doc and write 2-3 sentences. Right then. The fresher the memory, the better the detail.
Include impact, not just activity. "Worked on search" tells you nothing in six months. "Rewrote search indexing pipeline; query latency dropped from 800ms to 120ms, reducing support tickets by 35%" tells a story. Whenever possible, include numbers, timelines, and outcomes.
Don't filter. It's tempting to only log the "big" things. Resist that urge. The small wins add up and often reveal patterns you'd otherwise miss. Mentored a teammate through a tricky deploy? Write it down. Fixed a flaky test that had been annoying the team for weeks? Write it down.
Tag entries by role or project. As your career progresses, you'll want to slice your accomplishments by company, team, or project. Good categorization now saves painful archaeology later.
Review monthly. Set a 15-minute calendar reminder once a month. Scan your entries, fill in anything you forgot, and add context where it's thin. This small habit keeps your document honest and complete.
What goes in a brag document?
If you're not sure whether something is "worth" logging, it probably is. Here are categories to consider:
- Features shipped: what you built, who it was for, what the outcome was
- Bugs fixed: especially production incidents or long-standing issues
- Technical decisions: architecture choices you drove, trade-offs you evaluated
- Collaboration: cross-team projects, unblocking teammates, code reviews
- Mentoring: onboarding new hires, pairing sessions, knowledge sharing
- Process improvements: CI/CD changes, testing strategies, documentation
- Learning: new technologies adopted, talks given, certifications earned
- Feedback received: praise from peers, managers, or stakeholders (quote them directly)
- Endorsements from others: when a colleague specifically vouches for your work
That last category is especially powerful. When someone else says "this person's work was excellent," it carries more weight than any self-assessment.
Start today, not Monday
The best time to start a brag document was when you started your current role. The second best time is right now. You don't need a fancy tool. A text file, a Google Doc, or a notes app all work. What matters is that you start.
But if you want something purpose-built, with role-based organization, colleague endorsements, markdown export for your resume, and a clean interface that makes logging painless, that's exactly what we built BragDoc to be.
Your future self, sitting in that next performance review, will thank you.
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