Tooting your own horn: Why developers should celebrate small wins

Our development team kicked off the day with a call where we discussed communication. Lately, I’ve noticed that our #development Slack channel occasionally gets bogged down by minutiae.

I asked the team to hop on a call to unpack why this friction occurs and what we can do to avoid it in the future.

During the call, we discussed a range of topics: our different communication methods, expectations for receiving feedback on code, processes we could implement to help our work progress. But one of my favorite topics that came up was how to celebrate wins.

Writing code involves a lot of little victories

When Casey, our marketing coordinator, writes a blog post or newsletter, his work is out there for everyone to see. When Mwale, our QA Analyst, finds a bug, he reports it to the team. And when Ehlers or Bennemann, our technical support team, assist customers and receive glowing feedback, their efforts are celebrated in Slack. But what happens when a developer writes a really good line of code?

Up to this point, we’ve mostly only celebrated product updates and new releases, but these are the culmination of hundreds of “commits” (bundles of code changes). And many changes to code don’t add functionality that would ever be noticed by customers…or even by other developers on our team!

When changes are made to our code, we do internal code review before they get merged with the product. This involves another developer reading the code and making note of any issues they find. They’re looking for problems. During this process, it’s far too easy to look past all the good code that’s been written. And yet, so often in the world of development, the true victories are hidden within a single, overlooked line of code.

Sometimes a problem gets solved elegantly and thoroughly and it’s virtually invisible. How can the code reviewer and the team know about these hidden wins?

🎺 We’re going to try tooting our own horn… and you should, too!

During the call, I proposed an idea we’re excited to try: sharing and celebrating these small wins. We’re going to take some time to explain how we’ve kicked so much butt. This may involve, for example, making a video about our win and sharing it with the team on Slack so we can—at the very least!—get some emoji responses to our post.

We should take time to celebrate our wins, even though it’s often challenging when working remotely on a constantly evolving codebase.

The GravityKit team is a humble crew. We often keep focused. But we’re going to try sharing more about what we do well, because the alternative is that our work may go unnoticed. And going unnoticed often leaves one feeling undervalued.

Don’t forget to toot your own horn to let people know about the amazing work you’re doing (and especially if you’re a woman)!