Things I Wish I Had Started Doing Earlier

A work log is a document that contains the list of tasks you accomplished. The granularity and the type of tasks don’t matter, as long as you keep track of what you did.

Why is this work log important? For the following two reasons:

• To remind yourself of all the things you have done over the past 6 to 12 months. This is very valuable during performance reviews, so you can show your manager what you have accomplished and why you deserve that raise or promotion.
• To keep track of projects, notable responsibilities, and critical numbers (e.g., decreased latency by X% for a critical service) that you had over your career. This is great for completing your resume, whenever you want to venture into the waters of the hiring

Join the on-call team

This one may feel controversial, and it may not even be possible at your company. Of course, you should consider this advice only if your company has a healthy on-call environment (see On-call Compensation for Software Engineers).

The on-call team is composed of people who are willing to intervene if something goes wrong during and outside business hours, i.e., at night, during weekends, and on bank holidays. Your company may have a dedicated team of SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) for it, and/or your team may not be responsible for DevOps work.