What's your most recent "win" and how did you achieve it?
Posted by TheStatusPoe@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 71 comments
The constant negativity of industry doom and gloom posts or miserable team dynamics is draining. Hopefully this post can bring a little more positivity to this sub.
I'm curious what your most recent "win" is. What's something that you would put on a brag sheet so you could use it when updating your resume. The win might be something small where you can finally lean back in your chair and breathe a sigh of relief, or it could be something the team decides to make a whole event out of to celebrate (also how do you celebrate a win? It's important to recognize and reward what's went well instead of the only feedback being punishment when something goes wrong). Maybe it's a new hire, or your mentor, etc who's working out great. Maybe it's investigating a new open source project that fit into your architecture perfectly. Or maybe it's finally deprecating that pain in the ass service.
The goal in asking how the win was achieved is to share strategies, patterns, behaviors, etc that lead to success and reinforce them. I'm hoping the discussion helps in identifying positive feedback to help build a positive engineering culture.
cantgrowneckbeardAMA@reddit
I've been creating agents and skills for all our testing repos and now I'm building an orchestrator repo for all our testing. We'll basically have a single point of entry to UI, Backend, and E2E testing.
I initially started giving the projects agentic workflows just for me, but the benefit became pretty apparent quickly so my manager had given me free reign to let loose on everything. I'm kinda leading the charge for the rest of the engineering org, which feels awesome as a QA guy.
We try to be smart about our AI usage, always human in the loop, assume it's wrong, no AI PR review, etc. Our company is expecting everyone to be an agent first developer now, so I gotta play the game. I'd rather build the workflows that work for me instead of someone handing me a poorly fitting tool.
subLimb@reddit
This is my take as well. Might as well be an active contributor since this stuff is not going away. It sucks that leadership doesn't seem to have much of an idea about how to apply this stuff at an enterprise level, but the flip side of that is that it's a big opportunity for experienced devs to make an impact and try doing things the way we want them to be done.
cantgrowneckbeardAMA@reddit
Exactly. Staying employed is my top priority. If I need to become an agent first developer then I'm happy to do so.
The tech debt call out is a good one too. I have an agent that takes field bug reports and either identifies an existing test to validate it or writes a new one. On top of working through our ticket backlog faster, it's resulted in our test coverage increasing. Two birds, one stone.
I've also found that it can be easier for those less experienced with agentic development to interact with a familiar repo that already has a mature agentic workflow, instead of having to build out their own like I did. Then they can reverse engineer it and take what they learned about standing up agents, skills, etc. and carry it into the next project.
The final thing I'll add is they even though I'm the one who created basically all of our agentic workflows, I actively encourage people to update the files as they use them and check them into the repo. I don't really view myself as the code owner of our agentic workflows, just the guy who kicked them off. If someone identifies an improvement I'm more than happy to approve the PR.
_h4xr@reddit
There was a project that I proposed last year which redoes how we approach logging by consolidating our data emission and processing approach.
Cross team stakeholders were reluctant about the success as well as worried how it will impact performance of services
Ended up saving the company close to a million dollars per year, while proving that service performance actually improved.
thisFishSmellsAboutD@reddit
I updated my LinkedIn and set the slut button to "recruiters".
A really nice recruiter reached out to me and a dream job (looking for something I did in my previous job for 12 years) fell into my lap. Starting Monday. Wish me luck.
Few_Cauliflower2069@reddit
Win? Recent? Bro
TheStatusPoe@reddit (OP)
The less wins there are the more important it becomes to identify the few you might have, no matter how small.
Few_Cauliflower2069@reddit
Not losing doesn't mean you're winning.
OddEstimate1627@reddit
I worked for almost a year on an extremely complex project that I almost gave up on multiple times, and last week I finally put together documentation and people are already using it in production.
OddEstimate1627@reddit
Since it's public anyways, the project was an AOT compiled Java plotting library that exposes a C interface that gets wrapped by auto-generated idiomatic wrappers in multiple languages and platforms. Seeing a JavaFX chart run at >5MHz from Python was kind of magical.
New_Enthusiasm9053@reddit
Wanna add it as an option to matplotlib lol, thing chugs with a lot of points.
OddEstimate1627@reddit
Here is a video of it running in Python https://youtu.be/DpABFL211lo?si=8dQl_KR2Ll8v2d5_
The user code is fully isolated from the rendering thread, so it can't stutter even if Python busy-loops. It would be too complex to build all of matplotlib that way though.
hobbycollector@reddit
As a performance weenie, I salute you.
OddEstimate1627@reddit
I really like the encouraging comments in this community! Most people have no idea what it takes to get there.
Among other things, I added a deterministic single-pass layout engine, a wait-free dirty bit synchronization system, a zero-allocation label renderer using a glyph atlas with Schubfach for double decomposition, and did some crazy stuff like replacing garbage collector internals to be able to change promotion thresholds and heap sizes at runtime based on application state.
Heck, even downloaded mesh files get cached in a local webcache and stored as pre-parsed protobuf binaries, so users can load complex robots in milliseconds with multi-instanced meshes.
Those are all just internal implementation details though, so I rarely get to mention it.
theluggagekerbin@reddit
this is pretty awesome, i have no use for it right now but you bet I'm bringing it up any chance I get. the sheer speed of it is awe inspiring
New_Enthusiasm9053@reddit
Pretty neat.
zangler@reddit
That looks badass! I personally have no use for it...but it looks tight!
OddEstimate1627@reddit
Thanks! I'm glad others think so too
NPPraxis@reddit
I have no idea what HEBI is but this looks cool as hell
OddEstimate1627@reddit
It's the Japanese word for "snake" because we used to work on snake robots like this: https://youtu.be/8VLjDjXzTiU?si=m5tpr_9e7UQa9KKV
It makes no sense anymore and is confusing our Japanese customers 😅
demosthenesss@reddit
It feels lame but holding my job still feels like an accomplishment to me.
Exapno@reddit
In my understanding that’s basically a miracle in today’s market
hobbycollector@reddit
I've somehow managed it for 40+ years. One layoff, new job within a month (after holidays).
Exapno@reddit
😯 when I was laid off it took me like 6 months or so and now I’ve been passively looking for a year now with little better opportunities
hobbycollector@reddit
I was fortunate to have been laid off in late 2021. Spring of 2022 was madness.
NoPressure3399@reddit
I bet you are good at what you're doing and it's not by chance. Keep at it👍
demosthenesss@reddit
well I expect to be laid off by year end
so I guess remindme in 7 months lol
mike_the_seventh@reddit
I kept my mouth shut at a critical moment where I would have typically made enemies, which I accomplished by keeping my mouth shut.
AngrySpaceKraken@reddit
Our biggest client is a Fortune 10 company, and I spend most of my time coding their website designs. Their design team released a huge shoutout to me on the main channel, went into detail explaining what they appreciated about my work, and said I was one of the better engineers they've worked with. It was a nice kudos. But the sheer professionalism of that team certainly makes my work a lot easier.
GongtingLover@reddit
Im having fun in tech again
HatesBeingThatGuy@reddit
Had a very complex problem, my two best engineers were OOO and the team solved it with minimal input from me. It was a win for my mental. It was relief that I don't always have to be on anymore and my team has grown with the right leaders.
VictoryMotel@reddit
What about your medical and your cyber?
TheStatusPoe@reddit (OP)
Being on a team you can trust is massive! I've been ooo recently, and having some engineers I trust to build the right things has helped me to keep my mind off work and focus on recovery for my physical health.
It can be stressful to give the responsibility to others, but once they prove themselves it takes so much stress off your plate.
underscore-0@reddit
I survived two redundancies. lol it’s hard out there.
Also applied to 100+ jobs and only got rejections.
Valuable_Ad9554@reddit
Job seeking is such a full time job in itself to do seriously. Feels like having 2 jobs when you're doing it while employed, but that's the best way.
TheStatusPoe@reddit (OP)
Our company just had some layoffs big enough that it reached the news. The market is in a rough place.
Hopefully that means you're able to apply elsewhere while you still have a job, so you're not having to deal with that additional stress. If I'm reading that right, then that's absolutely a win worth celebrating. Hoping the best on your job search!
NotFlameRetardant@reddit
I got some big commendations from a brand new client last week after going live, and was the solo dev on that project. That made me realize that at my current workplace, I've almost exclusively been solo on projects for over a year now. That level of trust has been really affirming, even if it's not something to necessarily put on a brag sheet. They've also entrusted me to do mentoring and even running a few courses since I had a few years of background in teaching development.
I'm really happy with where I am, both career-wise and employer-wise.
zangler@reddit
Got a call from a non-technical just to tell me the stuff I have been slamming on for 6 months was all the president could talk about in meetings. He is excited and thinks I'm crushing it. Since this is a new job and new industry, that's about as good as it gets.
_predator_@reddit
So important for this kind of feedback to flow back to who is responsible. Too often it always gets passed down when it's bad news.
Hargbarglin@reddit
I spent 6 months working on a project that we've always needed that kept getting pushed off the priority list and delivered it without any hiccups. Annoyingly, success here doesn't seem to get noticed.
ShroomSensei@reddit
Joined a new company last year that operates very startup-esque. New tech stack, new domain, new everything so hitting the ground running was very rough. For the first time our last big development cycle I felt like I could finally breathe, lift my head up, and actually understand what the hell was going on around me. Give good feedback with actual reasoning on PRs, question requests, and be able to push back instead of thrashing for a week only to realize I was trying to hammer in a screw.
dash_bro@reddit
Stressful deadline. Parity overhaul between different API versions that requires SSE vs regular JSON response.
Worked two weekends in a row. Kept loudly and visibly encouraging the team to patch/experiment/deploy as many staging builds as they needed if they wanted to slice data contracts at different layers, and I'd support them over the weekend if they wanted to experiment with things too.
Successful sprint even with ill scoped LoE, but the team now is a higher trust unit on the whole.
NoPressure3399@reddit
I got 10 downloads on app store and 19 stars on github, it's a win for me and I hope the users think the app help them in their every day debug N development with kubernetes clusters. It might not be Earth shaking numbers but I'm proud. How did I do it? I grinded late nights after my kids went to sleep. Early mornings before work and school. Posting on all related subreddits for Kubernetes and Apple development. I enjoy it and plan to keep going at it as soon as I'm home from abroad.
Immediate-Quote7376@reddit
Finally spending those 1000 dollars in one month on Claude code like my CEO told me to
Local_Recording_2654@reddit
I crossed 1M annual salary recently. Stock appreciation, high risk appetite and got lucky specializing in ML before everyone else did.
alleycatbiker@reddit
Product Manager came up with a wild idea for a feature, but it would take collaboration from another dev team, data engineering/BI team and from devops/platform engineering. I was able to spear head the whole technical implementation while working on the documentation, communication and keeping all stakeholders in the loop. At the end I received praise for the multi team collaboration and alignment, even proposed some process improvements. My manager mentioned this episode will be icing on the cake during my next annual review.
How? I understood the only way to get it done would be to have these separate teams in constant contact and any blocker would have to be removed quickly. More than once I pinged my manager directly to ask for his support escalating when somebody we depended on wasn't on the same urgency we had. I guess it's a "feel" that's hard to teach when you don't have the experience. I would sometimes tell my manager "let's wait a little bit to see if I hear back from that guy" and other times say "yeah I think it's time to loop in the director and escalate"
onFilm@reddit
Working multiple full time contracts. Been at it since 2019.
Aeroxin@reddit
I've never done contracting (10yoe salaried) but have always been curious: how do you primarily find contract opportunities? Is it mostly word of mouth/network?
AchillesDev@reddit
I do this as well. LinkedIn, my network (many of my colleagues over the years are now founders or senior leadership elsewhere), as well as a talent network where I get offered jobs based on needs and my skillset.
onFilm@reddit
Same as always, LinkedIn. Once you get a few contractors reaching out, and manage to land a couple of jobs, it's pretty easy sailing from there, as contractors will help you land new opportunities.
AchillesDev@reddit
I do a lot of porting of features from research codebases (ML) to production ones. It's a huge pain in the ass, so I built a skill to help a coding agent do it better, as well as a deep verification skill (automated testing, linting, adversarial review, and behavior comparison between the codebases, plus human testing plans). I used it for the first time last night and was able to one-shot a huge feature into a new but different codebase.
I also finished the longest chapter (almost 17000 words) of the book I'm writing for O'Reilly, which is great.
SpiritedEclair@reddit
I turned an O(N) query to an almost const one.
kruvii@reddit
Still on a high for getting limits to lines of code allowed in our PRs.
TheStatusPoe@reddit (OP)
I would be riding that high for a while! Despite my pushback I still get 10k loc added PRs sent my way from time to time.
Out of curiosity, what limit did you set?
kcrwfrd@reddit
I published a polyfill for the new browser Navigation API.
I’m not aware of anyone using it yet (lol) but the code is very high quality and it was fun to be a craftsman again instead of an AI slop shepherd…if only for a moment 🥲
Link: navigation-ponyfill
(Hope link isn’t against the rules, I don’t mean to spam!)
kareesi@reddit
I wrangled a team in another org that is notoriously difficult to work with. I had a feature rollout blocked on them for 4 months which was causing my team an enormous amount of daily friction, but their team had no real incentive to fix the issue because my team owns the parent feature and was eating the pain.
Had to backchannel a ton but I finally figured out who was blocking the changes on their side and then met with them 1:1 to address their concerns and got them on board. Unblocked the rollout that same day!
DoingItForEli@reddit
oh man. Everyone's achievements are so much better than mine. I'm such a phony.
InterpretiveTrail@reddit
IMO, focusing on reducing the use of AI sporadically by using the classic phrase "Give a person a fish vs. teach a person to fish" and expanding it to also include "do you even need to give a fuck about that fish".
In particular trying to obtain feedback in our company's "Developer Help" slack channel for:
At my past two companies, I've found a nice niche in "how do I prevent this question from even being asked". What question it is ... that's been very different, but I've been a hybrid between Lead Software Dev and Staff SRE in both roles. Maybe it's just been a lens that I've been able to sus out high impact / low effort shit, and gotten lucky. It's been weird that there's seem to be less focus on viewing a centralized help channel like that.
That was just abstract, let me state that in a bit more practical way. Right now at my current company, token spend is just starting to be scrutinized, and just like companies moving to public cloud, one day the business will constrain and want accurate-enough accounting of things (FinOps anyone?!?). Because of that, I've focused on trying to identify why a questions was asked, if there's multiple questions like that, and then figure out if a solution can solve the question from existing.
I am using some LLM to make summaries of threads both the summary of the interaction back and forth in the thread, how to better state the question for next time, and a summary of the answer with some human validation. Its helped find specific needs within our org which has led to a small boon for what my org needs to work on and a backlog of good initiatives that managers can pick if the talent pool aligns with.
Politely, none of this is rocket science, but how some teams at my current company are just trying to drop AI to synthesize all our docs and code bases and assume it'll be able to answer questions miss the fact that they're just giving away a fish rather than teaching a person how to fish, or where appropriate people don't need to even do the fishing for certain shit. Token spend to apply bandaids vs. Root Cause Fixes / non-AI automation (i.e., automation that 100% does the same thing each time).
At a more senior level, I find those to be the life blood of finding new issues that are needing to be addressed or being overlooked. But, again, I'm a weird spot with Feature Development / Infra Junkie ... so working with a plethora of teams to navigate infra/networking/observability/security/etc. So YMMV based on what your role is.
Regardless if that was of use to anyone, best of luck!
Fartstream@reddit
Joined as a lead, convinced technical CTO that django signals are a foot gun and we should not use them. Established some trust and managed up.
Buff_Lightyear@reddit
We still have some signals unfortunately but the team sentiment is definitely no new signals.
Fartstream@reddit
Yeah we do too.
Its only been about a month so I can’t burn too much political capital.
The real thing I avoided was cross schema signals. As in django tenants/postgres. They had a signal writing from a tenant schema into the public schema. A real no no.
datsyuks_deke@reddit
Tackled a massive ticket thanks to the fact nobody bothered to do a proper discovery upon startup of this project for a client.
So I was blessed with the task to implement something that apparently a bunch of our clients had asked for, but it had never been done and product never had the capabilities of printing receipts from the mobile Verifone devices before.
It was a lot of work, but I learned a lot and it felt like an amazing win, especially since my work is going to be the foundation for future Verifone devices that our clients use, will be able to print out receipts instead of relying on a connection to an external printer.
twelfthmoose@reddit
Stopped running our own VMs on GCP and transitioned almost everything to serverless or managed micro services. Saved a ton of always-on cost.
This was a year+ project because of various legacy elements (shitty software-defined storage, docker images from the Stone Age, etc) and piece by piece I moved individual components. The biggest leap was some custom scheduling layers. End up with an event driven architecture. Tons of help from Cursor!
Gooeyy@reddit
Can I ask how you deal with cold starts? Are the containers powering the serverless apps super small? I’ve made a similar transition recently
twelfthmoose@reddit
They are not super tiny. Those services are all user-facing and sometimes there is a small delay but nothing breaks. But on prod I have some set up to always have at least 1 copy running. Other managed services like Cloud SQL aren’t serverless, but GCP manages the serves behind the scenes.
skg1979@reddit
Company went through 4 sets of redundancies in 4 years. I wasn't made redundant.
greensodacan@reddit
Two and a half years ago I nearly lost my right eye due to a retina detachment from glaucoma. One and a half years ago I had open heart surgery for an aortic root replacement. Six months ago I was being character assassinated by a new VP for advocating for disabled students at an ed tech company, a member of team was outsourcing his job and no one was listening, and we were about to crunch over the holidays because leadership had no strategy beyond "go faster".
Since then I've started my own LLC, completely shifted my stack, the software I'm writing runs 20-40x faster, has wider device support, and is more accessible. I've had the freedom to pursue agentic workflows without it eating my life. I'm spending more time with family. And even though I've been focusing on pipelines for the last six months, I've broken even financially due to swing trading in the stock market.
TheStatusPoe@reddit (OP)
I'll post one of my own. The team I'm on has built it's own reactive framework with a DSL with the goal of arbitrarily building workflows at runtime. This has been something that I've pushed back against for the last few years that I've been here. There's always been some reluctance on why we need that dynamic behavior. In my opinion it's introduced significant complexity with minimal benefits. It made the code base impossible to step through because there was no easy way of knowing what methods would call one another.
After nearly two years of pushing back on this pattern we finally are deploying a fixed, statically defined workflow that uses industry standard frameworks instead of our own home grown solution. It feels amazing to finally be able to look at our codebase and not feel immediately lost on a feature that was just developed. I know I'm not the only engineer who feels a sense of relief with the new development pattern.
I think the most impactful thing I did to get that win was questioning if old assumptions still held, and followed up if certain business use cases even existed anymore. One of the initial business requirements was to build a self service tool where a business user could hook into whatever data feed they wanted for whatever purposes they wanted. The requirements were vague because the use case was vague. After two years working on new features the needs of the business became more concrete, meaning less need for a fully dynamic solution.
The other key to the win was setting aside 30-60min a week for "learning" time where I would either read books or work on proof of concepts. I would regularly demo the pocs to just the engineers (I've got a personal "rule" against showing managers a poc lol), and leave poc branches open for a while, with no intention of merging, so that others could pull down those changes and try them out themselves. Over time those demos showed an improvement in both application performance and developer experience which helped my team start the discussions about how we would migrate.
We're using spring boot, and we're now finally using our tools the way they were designed instead of fighting them at every opportunity.
zdubbzzz@reddit
Cut runtime costs of an 4 years old application by about 90%/month by doing some infra changes
ThatRareCase@reddit
Interesting question.
My most recent one was using company hackathon to build an AI agent using LangGraph. Funny enough, I don’t count the AI agent as a win, it is that I managed to squeeze out company time for my own benefit. I work with a toxic narcissist team lead that keeps career opportunities to himself, and a spine less management that thinks he’s as good as they come.
So any time I get to showcase that he isn’t all that special and the only one who can do "AI stuff", it’s a win.
YK5Djvx2Mh@reddit
Cant talk about it. NDA