The summary survives, the evidence evaporates

Put two engineers in front of me with identical experience.

The first says: I worked on the checkout flow and improved performance.

The second says: checkout was dropping about one in four hundred orders on poor connections, I traced it to a race in the cart layer, and after the fix support tickets on that flow went to zero.

Same work. Possibly the same engineer, a year apart.

The difference is not communication skill. It is that one of them has a record and the other has a summary. And I can only score what I can hear, so the second one gets levelled higher, gets the offer, and gets a better number attached to it.

Here is why this is not a writing problem. The specifics evaporate on a schedule. You do the work, you move on, and eighteen months later what survives in memory is the headline. Worked on payments. Led the migration. Improved performance. The trade-off you rejected, the number that moved, the decision you owned when nobody else wanted it, all of it is gone, and it is exactly the material an interview is looking for.

I lost most of my first decade this way. Real work, some of it hard, and when I sat down to write about it what I had was employers and technologies.

The fix takes two minutes a week and it is almost embarrassingly small.

One file. Every Friday, three lines.

What broke or what I built. What I decided, and what I chose against. What changed as a result, with a number if there is one.

That is the whole system. No tooling, no tags, no app. People who try to build a system for this abandon it in three weeks. A plain text file that takes longer to name than to maintain is the version that survives.

After a year it is the most valuable career document you own. It writes your CV, your promotion case, and half your interview answers, in your own words with the details still attached.

And you can start with back-fill. Go through your last two years using the artefacts that still exist: commits, pull requests, tickets, design docs, incident reports. Pull out every specific you can still recover. You will be surprised by how much comes back, and by how much is already gone.