Hi CodeLand!
I'm Matt Van Itallie — the founder and CEO of Sema Software. I'm proud that Sema is a sponsor of CodeLand this year and I'm excited to connect over our shared love of coding.
If you haven't heard of us before, Sema is a software company obsessed with code quality and helping developers grow their skills and advance their careers.
We have a free code review assistant/developer portfolio tool now available for GitHub. You can find it here
Let's Talk About Brag Books!
I'm thrilled to be giving a Lighting Talk at CodeLand 2022 on creating a "brag book" — also known as an accomplishment journal.
I hope you'll tune in and then consider creating a brag book for yourself! I truly believe they can equip early-career software developers to reflect on and explain what they've learned and what they've achieved at work or in school. This process can be as important for career advancement and personal growth as carrying out the work itself!
You can learn more about how to create a brag book and find free Google doc templates here
What's next?
I'd love to hear from you. Reply in the comments with questions or examples about building your own Accomplishment Journal.
We're hosting a Developer Portfolio competition this summer with prizes from our sweet merch store. Sign up here if you'd like to be informed of this contest and participate.
You and your team are welcome to use our code review tool. Sign up on the website or send us an email.
All of us at Sema are wishing you a great experience at CodeLand this year. 🌈
Oldest comments (33)
hi everyone!!! so excited to be here
Woah.So excited to participate your Developer Portfolio competition🤩🙊
thank you! please sign up so we can let you know when it's ready
right now the Portfolio works, but your team has to be using our free GitHub plug in for codereviews to have any data...
soon you'll be able to use it on any GitHub repos, starting with OpenSource, even if you haven't used the plug in
A brag book is such a good idea. Excited to listen to your lightning talk, Matt!
thank you! i would love to hear your feedback!
LOVE the idea of a brag book!! Thank you for this.
thank you! would love to celebrate your successes and growth!!!
Very cool tool you've created. I want to try it out for sure.
wonderful-- you can sign up for free at semasoftware.com/
Excited to learn more about the Brag Book. As a new developer (and to tech), I'm looking for ways to document my work/learning, so this is a great idea.
great!
semasoftware.com/blog/how-to-build... is a link to the longer explanation along with free google templates you can use to build it
and we have a free github extension you can use to create one too-- learn more or sign up at semasoftware.com/
Can't wait to hear this talk, what a nice idea, kind of like those posts you see of artists posting their work from a year before and then their art now and you can see the improvement.
100% it-- exactly!!!
Sema is such a welcoming community, such humble people like mattvanitallie building and supporting opensource. A must try thing for all developers. if you encounter some problem or suggestions, do follow up with us on discord at discord.gg/pKP87qHA to connect with sema community
honored. Thank you Simarpreet, I am so glad you are a member of our community!!!
I really love the idea of an accomplishment journal.
I don't think I've ever believed in myself so much since I've been learning web development. For my whole life, I didn't think I could really be good at anything. And I've had moments in my learning journey when I felt the weight of that lack of belief in myself because I was having trouble understanding a concept or becoming overwhelmed by how much more there still is for me to learn. But when I stop and look at where I am and what I know now versus where I started, suddenly I can't deny my own ability to grow anymore. And the good, fuzzy feelings that brings motivates me to grow even more! It's a dopamine high, basically.
So I think keeping an accomplishment journal is a great idea because it would facilitate that.
Um, thank you for coming to my TED talk lol.
Amazing! I believe in you!!!
more importantly-- the data about your journey means you have to be honest with yourself, i.e. that you HAVE learned a lot, and not too self-critical.
:D
Just heard the lighting talk and this is something I need in my journey. I am very hard on myself since I am not where I want to be and because of this it is easy to overlook my many accomplishments. Definitely going to looking into starting a brag book and also looking forward to the portfolio competition.
terrific! here's more on the Accomplishment Journal including free google templates -- semasoftware.com/blog/how-to-build...
Thank you!
Wish the lightning talk was longer! 😆 But definitely got my attention! The concept of having an Accomplishment Journal / Brag Book sounds like the best solution to combat Imposter Syndrome; something I feel every developer struggles with. Thank you, Matt, for sharing!
thanks Aaron! here's more if you're curious-- semasoftware.com/blog/how-to-build...
I don’t have a journal specifically for accomplishments, but I do maintain a developer journal where I write about my projects—things like errors that came up and how I solved them, concepts I learned more about, what I want to improve on next time. It’s really helped me learn a lot, especially since talking and writing notes is how I process and absorb information. Making a Brag Book sounds like a great idea and I’ll definitely check out your templates! Thanks for sponsoring the conference; it’s been awesome 😊
Anya that is wonderful and exactly the spirit-- growth as well as accomplishments. keep it up!!! Here are some tips that could be helpful, enjoy-- semasoftware.com/blog/how-to-build...
Great work as always by Matt , Perfectly explained everything in detail and love the way that our community is growing more and more daily and encouraging about a lot of effective and efficient things in tech , specially open source and its contributions. From helping people to start from scratch to helping them build their solid developer portfolio and various other practices are just really amazing! & so helpful. All the thanks to Sema and all the community members behind it. I've been member of Sema since a while now and really appreciate the way of guiding and solving issues in person and Yes , I do write my Developer Diary for most of the solutions, Handy tricks and links to resources. Thank you once again to Sema and Codeland for this great work to empower communities & developers. Have a very good day!
amazing, thank you Lavish for the shout out! If you ever want to post examples on socials, please @ me or Sema (@vanitallie_matt and @semasoftware1) and we'll celebrate it!
Great talk! I loved the idea of an accomplishment journal. I was working on a blog post about a project and had to 'search' my various notes to remind myself. This included Twitter posts and my daily log of activities, where I keep track of what I did in my learning and solutions I found. It gave me such a confidence boost to see all I'd accomplished. We often forget, so keeping all our accomplishments in one place is a way to give ourselves' pats on the back!
amazing amazing Jolene!!!
here's a blog post with some templates if you want some more inspiration
keep it up and thank you for sharing!!!!
semasoftware.com/blog/how-to-build...
I find the hardest part of an accomplishment journal is to identify accomplishments 😅 It's so easy to brush off what you already know how to do as easy and not consider how much effort went toward developing your skills to the point you're able to do something!
totally agree
one trick could be to organize your accomplishments around: