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2012 in review (and a secret to chronicling your accomplishments)

Not that long ago, if you asked me “what have you accomplished lately” I might stare at you blankly, before maybe scrounging something up.

It reminds me of when I was a kid at church, and we could only have snack if we said an act of kindness we’d done that week. Now, because I was not a terrible person, obviously I had done something nice (holding open the door for someone could count), but I could never remember. Bad memories are stickier in our minds than good memories, and I find the same to be true of remembering one’s accomplishments. You can remember when you messed up, but what about when you excelled?

That’s why I have my bullets. Literally, it’s a file called bullets.txt (so it’s easy to find) where I list big things I’ve done that are on my brag sheet. ‘Bullets’ because if you need to, grab things from it for bullets on your resume, for grant applications, etc. The ‘bullet’ term also comes from the military – if you’ve done something that should end up on a performance review, it’s common to hear higher-ups say “That’s a bullet” to remind you to add it to your list of accomplishments to share with command.

So while this post falls under those “year in review” (because I’d love to read yours!), I hope you get more out of it – start your own bullet sheet, and remember the great things you’ve done.

2012 Bullets, Boiled Down

  • GirlDevelopIt Courses: WordPress Instructor, JavaScript Instructor, Android TA
  • Python Community: PyStar Instructor, PyCon Poster Presenter (and spent 10 days in California meeting people and hacking), PyStar/PSF PyCon Scholarship Awardee, Julython Organizer, started developing for OpenHatch
  • Joined Paperless Post, wrote a ton of CSS libraries (and deleted a lot of CSS), started writing for the mobile web, became part-time New Yorker, met many, many, amazing people in New York as a result
  • Ruby Community: Assisted The Ruby Workshop, spoke at Philly.rb, active in NYC Ruby Women (and a little speaking there as well)
  • Women In Technology Summit  Committee (and Philadelphia Geek Award winning event), Panelist at the Summit
  • Random Hacks of Kindness June, joined RHOK problem definition working group
  • Mentee in Tech Mobilizer program (and met an amazing mentor)
  • Taught a Skillshare class in Chapterhouse
  • SEPTA Hackathon participant with an awesome Android team (SepToken)
  • AdHawk (previously WhoPaid App, a RHOK Dec 2011 project) was picked up and deployed by the Sunlight Foundation to help people learn who’s behind political ads
  • Co-organized this year’s Philly Code Retreat
  • Community Blogger at Grace Hopper 2012
  • Spoke at BarCamp again this year — to a lot more people!
  • Traveled to Hawaii and spoke at CSSDevConf and met loads of amazing people, and learned a ton
  • Spoke at Node Philly’s Hack & Hops event

It’s pretty lovely to have that list to look at, and that’s separate from my work-related bullets that get into some more specifics of what I’ve accomplished at Paperless Post in my time there. Do you have a bullet list? Would you share? Post your link in the comments.

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