I split my time between Squarespace and the New York Times for five years before jumping into startups. A recurring ritual in corporate life is the performance review, which typically includes a self-evaluation, manager evaluation, and 3–4 peer reviews.
As a senior software engineer and tech lead, my days were constant context switching: stakeholder meetings, production issues, team conflicts, and shipping features. I could barely remember last month, let alone everything since my last review.
I’d heard the advice to maintain a brag document, but never did. As far as I know, most of my colleagues didn’t either.
My solution: review all documentation I’d led (RFCs, roadmaps) and every ticket in Jira. This consumed an entire day each year. Cobbling together JQL queries, scouring GitHub repos, and summarizing accomplishments I should have documented all along.
The system worked when it was just me. As I moved up, I tried scaling it to give better feedback to junior engineers. Then other team leads asked for me to review their work. Soon I was spending half a week on performance reviews, with most energy spent finding tickets and pull requests, not preparing useful feedback.
Performance reviews remain fundamentally human. Crafting empathetic, actionable feedback requires human judgment. But LLMs excel at summarizing content, and that’s where technology can help.
Today, I’m releasing whatdidido. It is an open source CLI tool for software engineers to save time during performance review season.
What it does:
Scrapes ticketing systems (Jira and Linear)
Creates short summaries of each ticket using an LLM
Summarizes across tickets to help build a cohesive narrative
The tool doesn’t replace human judgment, context, or empathy. It eliminates days of sifting through tickets to remind yourself what you accomplished.
Visit GitHub for installation instructions. Key details: MIT-licensed, no data storage (everything stays under your control), requires an OpenAI or OpenRouter API key (check your organization’s policies first).
Feedback and contributions welcome!