Show HN: Record Your Accomplishments
accomplishments.app
accomplishments.app
This is certainly very real, I feel it quite a bit, I recognize references to this more frequently. And they all tend to assume that imposter syndrome means that people are truly capable.
This is an interesting assumption as true imposters also feel like imposters. I don’t mean con people, they are quite brazen. I mean incompetent people also feel like imposters.
I suppose it’s nice to help false imposters overcome their anxieties. But I’d like to see data on false vs true. Assuming that true imposters are false can lead to just lots of noise about BS accomplishments.
I had an employee who would laundry list accomplishments during their annual reviews and it was hard to distinguish true accomplishments vs things like going to a meeting (listed many times) or preparing meeting minutes (listed many times). That employee was challenging and more so because they ascribed to a philosophy of “celebrating all accomplishments.” It was like having unbirthday parties with people not as much fun as the Mad Hatter.
Isn't that just what impostor syndrome means? It's not a syndrome to correctly identify yourself as an impostor. That's just "being an impostor".
When peers say "that's just impostor syndrome, don't worry about it!" they're reinforcing a groupthink that we should ignore the truth. The truth is that we often do excel despite our own shortcomings - but those shortcomings are real. We shouldn't hand-wave them away just to feel better, we should be focusing on improving ourselves.
Well, not all. Does the share of people that feel like imposters increase or decrease with expertise? I have anecdotal evidence pointing both ways, and no good real study to get data from.
Anyway, imposter syndrome hurting competent people is way too common to ignore. You are just combating the reciprocate hypothesis, what is ok as long as it doesn't also harm the original one.
PS. There's a typo in the html <title>.
But... It is only half the equation.
If your manager isn't doing same, they suck at their job and you should leave.
Your manager should keep a file on every single one of their reports that details that report's accomplishments, fails, training, wants, likes, dislikes, etc. They get this info from talking to everyone - constantly.
When review time comes, there should be no surprises. If you walk into the room for you review (or call or whatever), and you don't have a strong idea what your rating is, your manager sucks and you should leave [0]. There should never be surprises during reviews. You should never have to remind them of your accomplishments - though you should be prepared to.
A manager's job is to manage. If they're not doing the above, they suck and they're not doing their job and you should leave.
[0] Or you suck and can't pick up on what their trying to tell you, but that's another rant.
A good manager once drilled all this into me.
Even the managers who I considered to be good at their jobs didn't record this stuff.
I wouldn’t pay for this but something to think about is an organisation might because they should want to know what their staff have achieved. Otherwise all they have to go on is completed tasks - which we all know isn’t everything. There is value in gap fillers.
A org focused product would be great especially if it was rounded with 1-1 and performance review stuff. products like that already sell which is a good sign.
I signed up for Pro. I think you may want to make a "pay what you want" option with $10 as the threshold for Pro features. I would have paid more, especially as it's a one-time payment.
One note for you: the title of the pages on mobile are "Accoumplishment App" rather than "Accomplishments App." Probably an html title tag to edit.
Things like "designed and created an algorithm to index the internet using c++" or "developed an online platform for selling books using php".
My reminder is stepping into the transport tube home. I spend maybe 3 hours in 5-15 min blocks a month.
I feel as though I'm your target customer in that it would give me better visibility of what I have recorded and more ready access to analysis of it.
(here comes the but...)
Please don't take this as a slight on your product or your work but somehow it feels too expensive for the quality difference between my current process and what you are offering. I couldn't give you feedback as to specifically why or what features would convert me to a paying customer just that I wouldn't purchase it or evidently sign up for the free account.
At least one other person has signed up per comments here and yet I am comfortable with my enormously long horizontal rule separated... work blog diary?
On a side note, I think a market exists for it and I applaud the effort in creating it - can you comment on your tech stack?
I recommend enabling accomplishments.app/username listing the accomplishments publicly for those that enable that. Vanity is a powerful pull.
I originally thought this would be useful for every todo. Once done, it would be put on the list of "done" accomplishments. But, accomplishments of too fine a granularity are not really motivating anymore. I'm interested in trying to zoom out and see what it's like to receive a summary of "accomplishments" instead of "tasks."
Nice work!
If I fix something big or get something done, I just move to the next thing, perhaps an app like this can help me document that if I am not too lazy to use it.
It's great for helping me look up "what was that fix I did a couple years ago?", but it's also invaluable come perf review season. I go through literally every day's notes for the last year, summarize each day into a bullet, then re-summarize into higher-level tasks and accomplishments.
[0] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2020/09/coding-career-advi...
- Organizing text (e.g. source files)
- Ordering text (e.g. based on dates)
- Syncing text to a backup (e.g. gdrive)
- Setting up a reminder (e.g. crontab)
All of the above are kind of core competencies of a lot of engineers. So I think it has to do more, such as drag-and-drop images like Evernote, integrate with Jira/Slack, integrate with Anki (for whatever reason), I don't know...
I like the idea, but personally, I wouldn't buy it because I can do all of the above myself with literally minimal effort. I hope you can make it a more compelling offer. Looks great to me though, I wish you all the success!
Note that maybe the solution is to target different users than engineers. Students wouldn't care about Jira/Slack integration, for example. Then again, students wouldn't pay for this, they get their stuff for free from Microsoft.
/s
This!
Also, do it like backups the Linus way: let other record them for you :)
Apps distract / disrupt flow too much for me.
Just create a text file with vi(m). Type ":r !date" to get the date, then type in what you did at the top of the file. Then ":wq" to save and quit.
That's it. I've done this for decades and it's perfect. An app? Are you insane? As if an app is going to last for more than 5 minutes.
The only caveat I will give is, is that you can do so much with it with the stock options and its graph and throw in the plugins you can get within the app, you can easily spend so much time trying to perfect everything. I got burnt out with notion really fast since most of the community at least on reddit gravitates to showing off what your landing page looks like.
While that's a bit of a joke that gets tossed around occasionally, i don't think that this makes it any less worthy of a discussion. Sure, Dropbox might have bunches of complexity, but if you have a simpler alternative that works for you, why not consider that in earnest?
Thus, i think the comment stands and if nothing else, will probably lead to some folks sharing more information about their setups and what works for them, like i did in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29932945
Oh, and put it on a server somewhere if you want to share it with people without needing to email it to them.
Maybe transform it into HTML+CSS if you want it to look better than the browser default text, and change it a bit for people on mobiles.
You could also make a form and a service so you can update it when you're not using the one computer the original file is on too.
Oh dear, you accidently built your own app.
You mean like it's possible to do with cron + rsync? Or maybe something like BackupPC, or Bvckup, depending on whether you also feel like you should automate backups of your own devices, not just a particular file?
> Oh, and put it on a server somewhere if you want to share it with people without needing to email it to them.
Come to think of it, why not have this folder (that's also backed up) be a part of your own Nextcloud install?
> Maybe transform it into HTML+CSS if you want it to look better than the browser default text, and change it a bit for people on mobiles.
Nextcloud handles both the remote storage aspect (e.g. a copy in another location), sync with your devices when you want it both on desktop and mobile, as well as allow sharing stuff through its web UI, if you expose it (or a separate instance of Nextcloud) to the outside world.
> You could also make a form and a service so you can update it when you're not using the one computer the original file is on too.
Curiously enough, they also allow editing many file formats in the browser, should the need arise, so it's not like you need to create that functionality for your specific file/data type when it already exists for text files in generalized form as a part of their software.
> Oh dear, you accidently built your own app.
No i haven't, because while it would be a nice educational pursuit and perhaps just something fun to do over a weekend, i use tools that are better suited for the general use case (preserving and sharing files, optionally with a web interface) and that are actually maintained by others for this.
You don't always have to reinvent the wheel for everything, depending on existing software that's probably both stable and popular (and hence well supported) is entirely valid for this. Text files are perfectly well as the actual storage medium.
Of course, if the OP wants to make an app for this, let them! Nothing wrong with that either, different things will work for different folks. For example, i almost always use LibreOffice for working with documents locally, but others do it almost only online with Google Docs or whatever Microsoft offers nowadays.
That said, i still think that there is perhaps some merit to the critique over micro apps popping up but many of them probably not being viable long term and just being bound to disappear eventually.
- have a container cluster that you already use for 95% of your software, both on your homelab and external VPSes
- run a simple Docker Compose file or an equivalent against that cluster, let the orchestrator figure out the rest (takes about 15-30 minutes, in total)
- or perhaps just have Nextcloud set up already, since it's silly to limit yourself to the use case of just notes: why not your own personal data, pictures, scripts, documents and so on?
- as an added bonus, you escape the clutches of The Big Tech a little bit more and are in control of what is actually running for you where; you don't have to count on the providers of this app being so generous as to give you access to your own data, since it comes out of the box
Edit: here's a simple example of how to run Nextcloud with Docker Compose https://github.com/nextcloud/docker#running-this-image-with-...
I think I'm going to counter your argument by saying you should write your own web application for keeping notes because that's far simpler and quicker if you've already built it.
In my eyes there's a large number of ways to run applications, some of which are easier (containers) and some of which are harder or more error prone in the long term (manual installation of DBs, configuration files etc.).
A telltale sign of the person perhaps thinking of the second approach is the fact that they suggest that configuring Nextcloud would take a weekend, whereas with containers (and sane defaults/example configurations that can be run as code against your cluster vs a long document of steps to take) it becomes more easy.
Additionally, some software out there takes long time to configure regardless, due to its complexity. Nextcloud is not one of those pieces of software, so it's probably helpful to point that out. Not knowing that or perhaps having a different opinion is fine. Claiming that all software is cumbersome to setup and would take a weekend is false (from my perspective).
> I think I'm going to counter your argument by saying you should write your own web application for keeping notes because that's far simpler and quicker if you've already built it.
As stated before, different things work for different people. I wouldn't write apps for such narrow purposes because general solutions for file storage etc. work for me, whereas someone else might benefit greatly from the learning experience and the hassle free hosting of PaaS like Heroku (if they can afford it), whereas someone else might just sign up for a web app that someone else has developed, versus someone who'd just write their stuff down on a USB memory stick, or even store a file in their file system with no backups.
Of course, it's not just a matter of personal preferences, but also familiarity. I can tell someone that setting up a cloud service is a good option because it's almost effortless for me to do so, yet it won't be so for everyone out there. Likewise, someone could tell me to replace my weather station with an Arduino that has a humidity and temperature sensor, as well as a LCD screen - if they've worked with embedded and SoC devices a lot, they'd also be right, but their suggestion might not be quite as viable for me.
Each approach have their advantages and disadvantages. My argument is that you don't have to write an app even if you need the aforementioned fancy features (backups, cloud storage, sharing, editing in the browser etc.), because there are solutions out there that let you get pretty much all of those out of the box and not just for your notes.
Apparently setting up your own cloud service at home is really simple, super smooth experience, you just enter a command and there it is, interface, backups, security, just magic.
Because it deserves to be heard, as do those of people who disagree with me. When people disagree about their preferences of getting things done, that means that there are perhaps 2 approaches that work and that might just be worthy of exploration. You don't need to be Einstein to get things done in either of the approaches, the rest is about figuring out which tradeoffs you'd prefer to make.
Otherwise we'd end up with a generation of people who don't even know what even can be done. That whole "Dropbox is just rsync" is a bit of a meme at this point, but at the same time it might actually introduce someone to rsync and they'd benefit from it. I know that i sure did once i first heard about it. I have actually been introduced to many nice technologies and approaches due to similar discussions online.
I'd like to link this article on a similar note: https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_...
If no one chimed in about self hosting, as people do about using Linux, FOSS and many other things, people out there wouldn't even consider those a possibility.
> You are just one of 100s of millions of people who use digital devices.
Maybe in a decade one or two of those millions will have converted to running their own services and a smaller part yet will contribute back to the community in some way: be it help with documentation, software development, testing, discussions etc.
You also conveniently left out the part of buying hardware and installing and configuring OSs and software to run everything and making sure you have the necessary backups and redundancies to maintain a near flawless uptime on par with any cloud service.
Your bloated scope of recording all sorts of data does not fit the intended goal. That the app will sunset is merely your opinion that is inherently bias to building everything from scratch. It is not viable for nearly everyone other than those belonging to niche enthusiasts communities.
See the disclaimer about familiarity with things. It means that it was easy for me, a pretty average individual in many respects, after investing a bit of time into learning self hosting in general. I'd argue that it can be the same way for many of the technically inclined folk on HN as well, if they care to explore it.
> That everything you listed their is a dependency waiting to fail. That they are products run by companies who can change their licensing, pricing and privacy policies. They can be bought out by other companies and release new versions that add/remove features that break your setup.
Disagreed.
Here's a list of dependencies in such an example setup:
- Ubuntu or Debian, have been free since their inception, easy to switch out for anything
- Docker or Podman or containerd, have been free since their inception, easy to switch out for anything OCI compatible
- Docker Compose or Docker Swarm or Hashicorp Nomad or Kubernetes, have been free since their inception, switching them out possible, would need to rewrite the deployment descriptor (possible in an automated fashion with tools like Kompose)
- PostgreSQL or MySQL or MariaDB, have been free since their inception, more problematic if data needs to be migrated, but can just re-import your files through the UI if that ever needs to be done (have done that during upgrades)
- Nginx or Apache or Caddy or Traefik, have been free since their inception, switching out would mean rewriting the config, doable
- Nextcloud or ownCloud, have been free since their inception, switching out would be similar to the DB migration, just reimport the data (have also done so)
And no, they cannot release new versions that break any of my stuff, since i can run old versions in perpetuity should i so choose. They might release new versions and nothing will change. They might remove old versions but i'll still have them in my registry or even local Docker installs. The whole Docker Hub might burn down for all i care and i'll still have the old versions. That concern would only be valid in the case of auto updating software, such as snaps in Ubuntu, which is why there was a lot of backlash when they released it. So, currently i decide when i'll install updates to my own software (though it's also nice to enable automatic updates for system software, as opposed to "user" software).
> You also conveniently left out the part of buying hardware and installing and configuring OSs and software to run everything and making sure you have the necessary backups and redundancies to maintain a near flawless uptime on par with any cloud service.
My current home servers run on refurbished 200GEs, consumer motherboards, consumer value RAM, passive cooling, a bunch of 1 TB Seagate Barracudas (because i like having up to date backups) and on the whole seem more cost effective than any of the cloud hosting that you could get out there, both in regards to storage, as well as long term costs of renting services. That also extends to storage plans for things like Dropbox, Google Drive, or most of the SaaS apps out there. Plus, i believe that my personal information also has an inherent cost to it, so if you add that into the equation as well, a homelab makes even more sense.
As for setup, it's not as bad or scary as many make it out to be. You can have an install of Ubuntu or Debian up and running in 15-30 minutes, something that you might have to do once in 5 years, before an immense amount of freedom opens up to you. Granted, the additional configuration on top of that for me is a few dozen lines of shell scripts, since most of my software is in container clusters nowadays, each stack having a YAML file or two, which are all that i'll need - this also makes migrating over to new nodes immensely easy and gives me a nice way to manage my data and resources.
Saying that you need near flawless uptime is false and perhaps moving goal posts at this point. That said, most of my services have an uptime of around 99% (at least according to Zabbix) which is good enough for me and should anything ever break, i have the power to find out why that is and what to do to fix it, instead of having to sit around and twiddle my thumbs while someone at AWS fixes their darn SaaS even though the status page still shows green, whilst there's a post on the front page on HN in the mean time (yes, that happened).
> Your bloated scope of recording all sorts of data does not fit the intended goal. That the app will sunset is merely your opinion that is inherently bias to building everything from scratch. It is not viable for nearly everyone other than those belonging to niche enthusiasts communities.
HN in of itself is a bit of a niche community, but i'll stand up to your point of view nonetheless, the argument against self hosting and more and more reliance upon "Service as a Software Substitute" (SaaSS) is harmful and encourages you to give away your freedoms. Just look at what Richard Stallman wrote on the matter here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
Now, perhaps this is a debatable argument, but i'd also end up with a huge hammer that works for all sorts of nails (the aforementioned notes, documents, pictures, other files), whereas you'd end up with 10 smaller hammers for different purposes, which would be an incredible burden to keep working because of their brittleness - Python versions, package updates and security fixes, Ruby versions, Node versions etc. Now, of course, you might learn more by writing bunches of apps, but you should still have a plan in place to deal with the risks. If you're just using a bunch of different apps that someone else has written, however, you get the worst of both worlds - not really learning anything (even if you manage to solve your problem) AND not having control over what happens to the app or what's going on behind the scenes.
Now, i'm not advocating for going full Stallman, but if you try self hosting, you'll see that it's not as bad as one might think, or at least i feel like most would end up with that conclusion in some capacity, unless they'd try setting up a Kubernetes cluster on day 1.
That said, when passionate people with differing opinions run into each other, flame wars can errupt, especially online, so i'll cease this discussion on my part. I hope that my point of view is clear however and that everyone can consider both my and your arguments and decide what works best for them, or share their thoughts or potential oversights on either of our parts!
No one is saying that though. People are only saying everything can be a website.