Performance review season: a short about the self-review you can't remember writing material for, and the weekly note I use now
Episode 5 of our Rozz shorts is about the self-review. Rozz's is due Friday, and the hard part is remembering what you actually did months ago. The fix isn't a better memory. It's a short note at the end of each week.
The note on Rozz's screen is a real one from Dev Second Brain, the Obsidian vault template for developers. It's the example weekly review that comes with it, "Week 2026-W39".
The top half is the only part you write by hand. There are four sections: Wins, Open loops, What I'd do differently, and Next week's focus. In the example, a win is "Turned the duplicate-email incident into a real fix: ADR-0001 accepted and first PR up within a day." One open loop is still waiting on IT. What I'd do differently is "Should have asked 'is this handler idempotent?' when reviewing the PDF receipt PR." The focus is one line, so if everything else slips, you know what should still happen.
The bottom half fills itself in. When you make the note with Templater, it works out the week's dates, and Dataview lists what happened that week:
- Decisions made this week, from your ADR notes.
- Incidents this week, with severity, status and cause.
- PR reviews this week, with your role and the repo.
- Tasks completed in daily notes.
It also embeds the Shipped and Learned sections from each daily note that week, so you're picking wins from a list instead of a blank page.
A Weekly Rollup dashboard puts every week side by side: each week's focus and how many open loops are left, decisions, incidents and PR reviews per week, and daily notes and tasks done per week. When review season comes, that's most of the self-review already sorted by week.
You need Obsidian (free) plus the free Templater and Dataview plugins. It's all plain Markdown files on your own disk.
Episode 6, "Home", is the finale.
Dev Second Brain is $19 on Gumroad, one person per copy, personal and commercial use allowed: https://subengel.gumroad.com/l/uoybkd
More of what we make: https://engelailabs.com