Marking the Wins
The idea comes from Lara Hogan’s donut manifesto: if you don’t deliberately mark the wins, you blow right past them on the way to the next milestone. Or as my friend says “You gotta celebrate the little wins”. I wanted to do the same for both my hobby (volleyball) and career wins. I have wanted to document these wins for some time, but never had a good patform until building this site. There is now an Albums section to “shelve” the items I will mark my wins with.
The hats
I always beach volleyball in a hat and I have amassed a large collection. I grab one at random to play in, and whichever one I happen to be wearing when I win a tournament gets retired. Lose, and the hat goes back in the rotation to wait for its shot.
The problem was that I had been playing for years, winning things here and there. Most of my tournaments run through 512 Beach, and their results have been posted to Instagram since I started. The history existed and I just needed to read it.
Reading 1,279 Instagram posts
…but I wasn’t about to go through their entire posting history to find each image of me. So Claude Cowork to the rescue! Cowork ran my browser, paging through every post on the account and reading captions for my name. A total of 1,279 posts from 2015 to the start of 2026 (no wins this year… yet). It came back with 15 first-place finishes and a screenshot of each winner’s photo. I combined these with other assorted wins to make up the final list.
The result is Volleyball Wins: a card for every first place with the retired hat, the date, the division, who I played with, and a link to the original post. A few hats (especially the older ones) are gone, but I did my best to match current hats with those from the photos. Twenty wins so far, 2018 to now, from a Men’s Unrated/B- (my first one with my long-time teammate, Bruno) to last December’s ladder league.
The sparkling water
Work wins go in Career Wins, and those get marked with a can of sparkling water instead of a hat. Same rule, different shelf. The first entry is a lychee QDOL (the Charmander can) for shipping Compass V2 this month. Promotions, launches, projects, or any other major milestone gets marked with a can.