In every project, I keep a simple table for myself: plans for the week/sprint and what I actually got done. Even when the team has a task tracker and everything is logged there
Why? This kind of log gives management visibility into my workload and hours if needed, but it helps me in other ways:
⭐️ it's a log of artifacts (links, decisions, changes)
⭐️ it's material for my resume and interviews
⭐️ and, unexpectedly important, it's something that keeps me grounded on bad days or when imposter syndrome kicks in
Last year I joined a development team to help with DevOps tasks and, as usual, started keeping this table. For the team, it was only useful for tracking my work hours, but it helped me see my accomplishments over time
In the moment, almost every task felt like routine work. Only looking back at the table helped me notice something worth paying attention to: in my first three weeks on the team, while onboarding on my own, I managed to build things the team still uses after I left
In those first three weeks, I created a modular CI/CD pipeline template from scratch and made it the company standard - a catalog of separate actions that can be assembled like building blocks with parameters, where developers just need to fill in a short list of variables for their project
During the same time, I also introduced and established the practice of recording architectural decisions (ADRs) for infrastructure and DevOps tasks, plus templates for standard projects across different languages and frameworks
So I recommend this method to others - keep your own activity log. Tasks in a tracker can get visually lost among all the tasks, sprints, and columns. Some real work might not even make it into the tracker. But your own log, even though it takes some extra time, stays with you and highlights your actual work
In the end, it turns into a conversation backed by data
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