{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Not-Boring Tech Writer","title":"Self-documentation for career growth with Kate Pond","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3064,"description":"In this episode, I talk with Kate Pond, a software engineer and former park ranger who turned self-documentation into a career superpower. We discuss her practical system of using Google Forms to track daily work and accomplishments, how this helps with performance reviews and job interviews, and why documenting your own work is essential for professional growth.—Kate Pond and I discuss her unique path from park ranger to software engineer and how documentation played a crucial role throughout her career transitions. She shares how creating personal runbooks as a college RA taught her that writing things down once saves countless hours of reinventing the wheel later. We explore how this philosophy extended into her transition to software engineering, where she documented everything she learned at technical meetups.The heart of our conversation centers on Kate's Google Forms system for self-documentation, which she created to track her daily work, accomplishments, and professional development. She explains how the system uses a mix of checkbox ratings (like \"how do you feel right now?\" on a 1-10 scale) and free-form text fields to capture what she worked on, who she collaborated with, what she learned, and what she's proud of. We discuss how this creates both quantitative data you can graph over time and qualitative records you can mine for performance reviews, peer feedback, and interview preparation.We also explore the broader philosophy behind self-documentation, including how it helps combat the reality that we simply can't remember everything we do, the value of having \"retro docs\" when taking breaks from projects, and how documentation for yourself follows the same principles as documentation for users. Near the end of our conversation, Kate shares practical advice from her career coach about doing \"scary hour\" sessions with a friend to tackle procrastinated tasks.About Kate Pond:Kate Pond is a Seattle-based software engineer, technical storyteller, and...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/JlP4_zZATprOmI0COWYcSJZswo0AzjaOmxyE_M5gX6M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kNTdh/ZjBlMjA5ZmEwZDhh/NTNjZWFiOWM2NWY1/ZDAzNS5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}