How to build a personal brand and get noticed

Daniyal — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 21:17:29 +0000

What is it?

Let's get to the chase, getting noticed is difficult as is, and without getting noticed there isn't much you can do to gain any advantage in life. From getting a job to gaining a skill, if you know people and they know you, things get easier.

A lot of people make a mistake of thinking that just because they build something cool, people will somehow magically know about it and start noticing them, this happens so rarely that it's better to spend some extra effort and market yourself efficiently.

Here's a scenario, if you have applied for a job, and the employer asks you for a CV, would it be better to send them a PDF which they then have to download and then open in some kind of program, or send them a link to your website preferrably with a domain that's in your name with all the extra cool details about you.

Having a personal website gives you a huge empty canvas to draw on, you can do anything with it to present your true self, and you can present as much info about yourself as you like. Unlike the constraints of a PDF where adding images and links may not always work as expected.

A website allows you to present all of your projects in a form that you want them to be seen in. Spend some time on it, this can be your first impression and you can really impress the potential clients with this.

On the note of projects

I see so many people, a lot of them just graduating from college who have absolutely no projects under their belt, these people then have to spend extra time after graduation to build up a portfolio so they can be hired somewhere.

Listen, you are spending 4-5 years at a university, you will be doing lots of projects, spend extra time on these projects, nobody is going to ask you or care about what grade you had in that Data Structures class but if you have a project showing all those skills put to work, you'll be way ahead of a lot of people.

Presentation

An amalgmation of my first and second point, you need to put effort to get noticed, and you need to build projects so there's something to notice. Presentation comes to play here, if somebody asks you to show them your project and the only way you can do that is by sending them a zipped up version of your project files which they then have to open, install dependencies, and then run, you have already fallen behind.

Here's a list of things every person getting started in tech should do:

Build projects

Host the code on github, preferrably with proper commit messages and history

Write good documentation, examples, images -- A good Readme would do

Host the compiled project somewhere and give this link to anyone who wants a demo

There you have it.

Do these things and you will have such a huge advantage over yourself if you didn't do it.

Track your time to boost your productivity

Daniyal — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 22:36:22 +0000

If you have been like me when I started to learn to code it was a huge challenge for me, I soon joined many of the popular coding movements like freeCodeCamp and the #100DaysOfCodes hashtag on twitter but nothing can make you learn code unless you actually do it.

Here's a simple method you can keep yourself on the path and while having tangible metrics of your progress. Use WakaTime in your editor and forget it, review it every week and aim for more coding time. You can code anything, but just do it.

I started from a goal of 8 hours per week which was pretty difficult for me at that time, but I was able to ramp it up to 20-30 hours of coding time.

Now 8 hours of coding time may seem little, but you'll quickly realize that a lot of your time is spent on researching and reading, which won't be counted by WakaTime. So an hour is equal to 2-3 hours of writing.