5 ways to invest in yourself for the long haul

Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to keep honing your craft. Rather than Herculean efforts every time you need to level up, change jobs, or share your work; let’s build a breadcrumb trail! I’ll talk about 5 tiny, everyday things that will reap immediate benefits and compound your self-investment.

If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that it’s crucial to continually self-invest. Your skills and abilities as a craftsperson are built on practice and the ways you show up for yourself. That not only means learning new skills but also being able to demonstrate intent and care to anyone that might be curious.

You don’t need to wait until the next big career shift to leapfrog your progress. Rather than Herculean efforts every time you need to level up, change jobs, or want to share your work; let’s build a breadcrumb trail!

I’ll talk about 5 tiny, everyday things that will reap immediate benefits. And as you show up every day, it’ll compound your self-investment. Before you know it, you’ll have a strong body of work you can instantly pull from without reservations.

At a local meetup’s holiday party, a friend turned to me during a discussion about building in public and said:

Yeah, you do put out a ton. How do you do it?

It’s a skill I’ve been working on since 2015, and I keep returning to 5 core practices that continue to pay off:

• Writing better commit messages and documentation throughout the day. Structuring them to focus on the why, rather than the how.
  • A commit message is a combination of a plaintext message and the changeset itself. I don’t need to rehash what the code already explains.
  • I’ll show examples of how I structure my commit messages, how I write them in the text editor I already know like the back of my hand, and how I prepare my code for easy review & safely rebase feature branches with automatic backups!
• Taking 5 minutes now to make breadcrumbs for yourself, rather than spending 5 hours at the end to recap the things you’ve done.
  • This frees up time for deep dives, rabbit holes, alternative implementations, and further study.
  • The commit messages I mentioned above are the first layer of breadcrumbs. But quick microposts, saving links in Zotero, and jotting down ideas are also crucial.
  • All of these breadcrumbs make writing substantially easier, since I am not working from a blank page and already have the components of an outline and research.
• Experiment on your own time; rather than tilting at windmills and burning out over ideas you have hunches about but you can’t get buy-in for in your bill-paying work.
  • This came to me from a friend who offered the suggestion when I was grumbling about some $dayjob friction: “Well, you don’t have to do that in your projects.”
  • So, I have a few projects I chip away at as my “model train station.”
    • I end up open-sourcing some of this work, and can freely & easily point to it because they’re my projects
• Treat all this writing and self-reference as a compound investment in yourself.
  • Doing this work and chewing on problems helps keep your muscles limber so it’s second nature. Things become easier because you’ve either:
    • Already done this work.
    • Done something pretty similar that you can pull as a reference and avoid dead ends.
  • It’s done incrementally. Sometimes I only get a couple of hours a month to put down actual code & ideas. But any progress is forward progress, and I get to pick the pace now rather than waiting for a crisis.
• “Write your own receipts,” as the kids say.
  • At my $dayjob, I’ve been able to win over the team to specific patterns and open-source libraries I refined because there was a working, proven example.
    • It’s much, much easier to come to the table with a strong body of work that demonstrates intent and care.
  • It’s led to me writing 12K words, proving an entire pattern library for Rails, and finding a rock-solid view layer.
    • I can share those guides & libraries whenever I’m at conferences and their topic comes up, which demonstrates my craft through proven work.

Continually applying these practices helped me build a strong body of work I could pull from when I was suddenly laid off in 2023. It then created a compounding interest effect. In the span of 2023-2025, I: - Started my own consultancy on the side - Was able to speak authoritatively on the intersection of frontend performance and maintainability with 2 extensive guides. - Open-sourced various tools I use in production - Became CTO at my $dayjob

These were all things that I wanted to do at some point in my career, and it became possible without significant/drastic changes because of these daily investments I made in my career.