Introduction

A brag sheet is an important tool for software engineers to track achievements and accomplishments throughout the year. With performance review cycles approaching, a comprehensive brag sheet enables you to effectively communicate your contributions and skills to management.

The goal of maintaining an engineer brag sheet is to document all of your notable projects, technical contributions, and leadership examples. This provides clear evidence of your capabilities and year-over-year growth when meeting with leadership.

Regularly updating your brag sheet during the year offers many benefits:

• Captures key achievements while details are fresh
• Allows identifying gaps to fill before review time
• Saves time by eliminating scramble to collect accomplishments
• Boosts confidence by highlighting your full capabilities
• Provides customizable content to tailor for reviews

What is a Brag Sheet?

A brag sheet in the context of software engineering is a document that highlights and summarizes an engineer's key skills, projects, accomplishments, experiences, and attributes.

The purpose of a brag sheet is to provide detailed evidence of an engineer's technical capabilities, leadership, achievements, and strengths. It serves as a comprehensive inventory of their knowledge, abilities, and growth over time.

A brag sheet differs from a resume in that it is more extensive and not tailored to a specific role. It acts as a master list that engineers can selectively draw from when applying for opportunities or preparing for interviews and performance reviews.

Brag sheets help engineers thoughtfully reflect on their capabilities and keep track of major accomplishments that can otherwise be forgotten or undersold. Having a living document that quantifies achievements, proficiencies, and impact enables engineers to confidently showcase their talents.

Sections to Include

With an updated brag sheet, you can confidently convey your achievements during annual reviews. A complete brag sheet contains:

Technical Accomplishments

• Projects delivered and systems improved
• Technical challenges solved
• Skills developed and expertise gained

Leadership and Team Impact

• Mentorship, coaching and team development
• Cross-team collaboration examples
• Project leadership and management

Awards and Certifications

• Certifications obtained
• External recognition received
• Conference talks and presentations

Performance Metrics

• Key business metrics improved
• Numerical accomplishments
• User testimonials validating work

Areas for Growth

• Skills to develop next review cycle
• Responsibilities aspiring to take on
• Training or learning goals

Detailing Projects

Go in-depth on key software projects and products you have built:

• Software projects and products built

  • Name of system, app or service
  • One-sentence description
  • Technologies used
  • Link to live site or GitHub repo

• Technical challenges overcome

  • Specific problems encountered
  • Custom solutions you engineered
  • Technical tradeoffs made
  • Anything implemented for first time

• Impact and measurable results

  • Numeric usage metrics
  • Business value metrics
  • Recognition or awards won
  • Testimonials validating technology

Being able to speak to technical accomplishments, not just responsibilities, is critical for showcasing your software engineering skills.

Describing Technical Growth

This section provides an overview of your core technical competencies as a software engineer:

• Languages and technologies in your stack

  • Include programming languages like Python, JavaScript, Java, C++
  • Frameworks: React, Node.js, Spring, Django
  • Tools: Git, PostgreSQL, AWS services
  • OS expertise: Linux, Docker, Kubernetes

• Areas of specialization or expertise

  • Detail specific sub-fields you have advanced experience in:
    • Machine learning, computer vision
    • Cloud architecture, microservices
    • iOS/Android mobile development
  • Highlight proprietary languages/tools you know

• Highlight proficiency levels for key skills

  • Denote beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert levels
  • Back up with years of experience or representative projects
  • Include proprietary or specialized systems

Quantifying your technical breadth and depth of knowledge provides tangible evidence of your engineering capabilities.

Optional Sections

Communicating Experience

Concisely summarize professional experiences that showcase your software engineering capabilities:

• Internships, jobs, freelance work

  • Company, team, position title and dates
  • Short description of role and your contributions
  • Technologies used and projects delivered

• Responsibilities and technical roles

  • Day-to-day coding tasks accomplished and systems built/improved
  • Leadership roles like tech lead, architect, team mentorship

• Teams worked on and leadership examples

  • Cross-functional roles and collaborators
  • Examples guiding projects, resolving disputes, coaching teammates

Quantifying achievements and conveying specialized responsibilities illustrates engineering competency beyond just a position title.

Showcasing Accomplishments

Highlighting academic and professional achievements provides evidence of your abilities:

• Academic, extracurricular or volunteer achievements

  • Awards, honors, scholarships, or distinctions
  • Leadership in student organizations and causes

• Test scores, certifications, courses completed

  • High test scores like SAT, GRE, HackerRank
  • Relevant certifications obtained
  • Specialized course projects completed

• Conferences, hackathons or events participated in

  • Speaking engagements and presentations given
  • Hackathons won or technically impressive projects built
  • Open source conferences and meetups attended

This section quantifies your technical knowledge and participation in the software community.

Conveying Personal Attributes

Share personal qualities and soft skills relevant to engineering:

• Collaboration and communication abilities

  • Detail team-oriented work style and cross-functional collaboration
  • Strong written and verbal communication abilities

• Problem-solving mindset

  • Analytical, logical thinker who breaks down complex challenges
  • Tenacity in researching solutions and learning independently

• Passion for technology and programming

  • Lifelong fascination with building software products
  • Constantly learning and staying updated on advancements

• Quick learner and desire to continuously improve

  • Rapidly picks up new languages, tools, techniques
  • Hungry to take on hard problems and develop new skills

This gives a well-rounded picture of you as an engineer beyond just technical ability.

Example Brag Sheet

Here is a hypothetical brag sheet example for a senior software engineer preparing for performance review. This example quantified achievements across the key categories on a brag sheet. It provides substantive evidence of the engineer's technical capabilities, leadership, and impact.

Technical Accomplishments

• Led migration of monolithic app to microservices, reducing deploy time from 1 hr to 5 min
• Designed real-time data streaming pipeline with Kafka and Spark, improving ML model accuracy by 15%
• Reduced mobile app network calls by 50% optimizing caching layer and access patterns
• Implemented WebSocket integration cutting page load times by 300ms

Leadership and Team Impact

• Mentored 3 junior developers through entire software lifecycle, providing code reviews and design guidance
• Led hackathon project building internal tool to automate release process, adopted by org
• Gave training on Kubernetes best practices to entire engineering org
• Worked cross-functionally to build project roadmap prioritizing tech debt reduction

Awards and Certifications

• Completed Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree certification program
• Invited talk at regional Python conference on microservice patterns
• Received company's Excellence in Mentorship award

Performance Metrics

• Mobile app ratings improved from 2.5 to 4.2 stars after launch of v2
• Microservice refactor increased feature development velocity by 40%
• Page views on marketing landing pages increased 150% after redesign

Areas for Growth

• Gain more depth in ML Ops and model deployment
• Take on people management responsibilities
• Learn Go to broaden backend languages

One Pager Cheat Sheet

• A brag sheet is a useful tool for software engineers to document their achievements throughout the year, providing a comprehensive record of their contributions and skills, which can help articulate their accomplishments to management during performance reviews.
• A brag sheet in software engineering is a comprehensive document detailing an engineer's key skills, accomplishments, and experiences, acting as an inventory of their professional growth that's used to highlight their abilities for job opportunities or interviews.
• An updated brag sheet for annual reviews should include Technical Accomplishments, Leadership and Team Impact, Awards and Certifications, Performance Metrics, and Areas for Growth; each section discusses respective details like projects delivered, team development, certifications obtained, business metrics improved, and skills to develop next review cycle.
• A resume is a concise professional summary focusing on work experience, educational background, and relevant skills for job applications, while a brag sheet is a detailed list of achievements, contributions, and impact, including personal learning goals and areas for improvement, typically used for employee performance reviews or self evaluations.
• The section suggests to detail software projects and products you have built, mentioning system name, description, and technologies used, and link to the site or GitHub repo, mention technical challenges overcome, talking about specific problems, solutions, trade-offs and new implementations, and also highlight impact and measurable results, referring to usage metrics, business value, awards, and positive testimonials, all for demonstrating your technical accomplishments as a software engineer.
• The section outlines the necessary information to convey a software engineer's core technical competencies, which includes detailing the languages and technologies in the stack, highlighting areas of specialization or expertise, and denoting proficiency levels for key skills.
• To create a well-rounded picture of your software engineering capabilities, highlight professional experiences, showcase academic and professional accomplishments, and convey personal attributes related to engineering, such as collaboration and problem-solving skills, within your resume's optional sections. Technical specifics should be described in backticks.
• This hypothetical brag sheet presents a senior software engineer's evidence-based achievements across categories including technical accomplishments such as migration of apps to microservices and implementing WebSocket integration, proving leadership and team impact by mentoring developers and leading projects, earning awards and certifications for machine learning and mentorship, showing positive performance metrics through app rating improvements and increased feature development velocity, and identifying potential areas for growth in machine learning and people management responsibilities.