You Did More Than You Remember
Cut through Jira noise and GitHub chaos and write a self-assessment that shows your real value.
This mini-course is part of the Level-up data engineering playlist. Click here to explore the full series.
December always hits the same way. You open the performance review form, stare at the empty text box, and immediately regret every choice that led you to this moment.
Jira is open in one tab, GitHub in another, and you already know none of it will help. Those tools are great for tickets and commits, but they’re awful for memory.
They show the trees. Never the forest.
I learned this the hard way years ago, before I even moved into data. I had just finished building a massive “Permit” module. Six pull requests that touched almost every part of our product. It shaped how the company built features for years. And somehow, when review season came around, I didn’t even mention it. I genuinely forgot I had done something that big.
Fast-forward to a spa offsite a few days ago. A coworker casually told me they still use the module. 9 years later! I laughed, but inside I felt the same old punch:
For data engineers, the most impactful work is the easiest to forget.
It’s scattered across tiny tasks. It doesn’t get a shiny project code. It lives in the cracks. And that’s the real problem with performance reviews.
Not the writing. Not the reflection.
It’s the realization that you don’t remember half the things you actually did.
Meanwhile, you’ve got people sitting next to you saying, “I became a data engineer to write code, not essays”.
My team member not wrong. Most engineers panic every December because they know they did meaningful work. They just don’t know how to explain it without spending two full days drowning in documentation nobody reads.
But here’s the truth: you did far more than you remember. And you deserve a way to capture it without losing a weekend or your sanity.
This mini-course is the system I wish I had earlier in my career. It’s a four-week, one-hour-a-week process to rebuild your year from memory, shape it into something coherent, and turn it into a self-assessment you’re actually proud to submit.
The real story of your year. The story you’ll use to negotiate, advance, and enter 2026 with clarity instead of doubt.
Why Data Engineers Forget Their Biggest Wins
Granularity Kills Memory
Data engineering is one long sequence of small, technical moves. A migration broken into twelve PRs. A pipeline cleanup spread across three sprints. A permissions system shipped in five chunks because that’s how the work naturally unfolds.
Individually, none of these pieces look impressive. Collectively, they can change the trajectory of a product.
But the brain doesn’t remember “PR #8423”. It remembers the feeling of fixing something big, and that feeling disappears the moment you jump to the next fire. By the time December shows up, all you can recall are the last two months and whatever you shipped recently.
The real impact, the projects with multi-year consequences, gets buried under the noise.
This is how every engineer loses leverage without even knowing it.
The Work That Matters Isn’t Documented Anywhere
Jira captures tasks. GitHub captures changes. Neither captures impact.
Your biggest contributions often look like nothing:
Two weeks of debugging that end in a one-line change.
Catching a data-quality issue before it corrupts three teams’ roadmaps.
A Slack question answered in 30 seconds that saves someone a full sprint.
A design review comment that prevents a reliability nightmare six months later.
None of that gets recorded. None of it gets celebrated. And these are the things leadership cares about, but only when they break.
Invisible work is still work. It just doesn’t leave breadcrumbs.
The Year Becomes a Blur
Most people think they forget their wins because they’re “too busy”. The real problem is that data engineering has no natural narrative arc.
You jump from tickets → meetings → DAG failures → refactors → Slack pings → schema reviews → more Slack pings → ad-hoc support.
There’s no beginning, middle, and end. There’s just flow**,** and flow is terrible for memory.
By the time you get to your performance review, the only things you remember are:
what happened recently
what was painful
and what someone yelled loudly about
Not exactly the best dataset to negotiate from.
And this is why I built this mini-course. Because you need a weekly ritual. The next four weeks are a one hour a week system to rebuild your year from scratch without drowning in Jira or your own self-doubt.