How to write a brag document
What it is
A brag document is a single document where you write down your work as it happens: what you shipped, who you unblocked, which decisions you drove, what you learned. Julia Evans made the idea popular in her post on brag documents, and it has become standard advice for engineers at every level.
Why you should keep one
Six months of work does not fit in your memory. When the performance review or the promotion packet comes, you remember the last few weeks and the one big launch, and the rest is gone.
Your manager sees even less. A large part of senior and staff work never shows up in a sprint board: the review that unblocked another team, the incident you closed at night, the design doc that avoided a rewrite. If you do not write it down, nobody will.
It also helps you. Reading a month of entries shows where your time actually went, and whether it went where you wanted.
How to write yours
- One document, newest first. A page in your notes app is enough. Group entries by month or by quarter.
- Start with your goals. Two or three lines at the top with what you are working toward this cycle, so each entry can be read against them.
- One line per entry. The date, what you did, and the impact. "Shipped the billing migration, which unblocked the March release" beats "worked on billing".
- Add the evidence. A link to the pull request, the doc, the thread or the dashboard. Six months later, the link is what makes the line credible.
- Write down the invisible work. Reviews that unblocked someone, mentoring, incidents, interviews, decisions you helped close.
- Update it every week. Fifteen minutes on Friday afternoon, while the week is still fresh.
- Share it before reviews. Send it to your manager a few weeks before the cycle closes, so they can use your words.
A template
## Goals for this half - Ship the billing migration - Make on-call quieter for the platform team ## October 2026 - 2026-10-17: Shipped the billing migration. Unblocked the March release. (link) - 2026-10-15: Reviewed Ana's retry change. Her team could deploy before the freeze. (link) - 2026-10-14: Sent the incident summary I promised Leo. The postmortem closed the same week. (link)
How Zebra fills it for you
The hard part of a brag document is the weekly fifteen minutes. Zebra already has the material, because your day is built from it.
Every morning, when Zebra prepares your day, the top task is chosen with a one-line reason: what it unblocks or which deadline it honors. Zebra keeps that line. Every evening, it keeps the promises you made in meetings and chats, with the words you said.
On Friday, the weekly summary checks in your task manager which of those top tasks you completed and which promises you kept, and your Claude adds one line for each to your brag document, in Notion, Google Drive or wherever your notes live. Nothing that was not finished goes in, and you can edit every line.
Connect Zebra to Claude and your brag document starts filling this Friday.