DEV Community: Yaroslav Tkachenko

How to Grow Your Network

Yaroslav Tkachenko — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:14:44 +0000

Growing your network is likely one of the most important things you can do before becoming a full-time solopreneur. And yet, many engineers don’t know how to approach it.

Having a large network is important for many reasons. In a services/consulting business, your network (and the references you get from it) becomes the source of your contracts. In a product business, it generates users.

And even if you don’t become a solopreneur, your network can provide better employment opportunities, so growing it is a no-brainer.

What is Network?

But what is it, really? Your network is not the number of followers you have. It’s about people you can reach out to. People who will respond when they hear from you. And, most importantly, people who will help, refer, recommend, try, and offer their time.

So, how do you get people like these?

The Most Important Rule

The rule is simple: you need to be able to provide value. It may sound transactional, but it works.

Agree to provide feedback on a product MVP. Give advice on how to fix a problem. Write a recommendation later. Support someone’s promotion case. Meet with an intern for a coffee. And so on.

You’ll likely not benefit from it. But you’re building relationships , not clients. This is a long game to play.

And always make sure to follow up when you promise something. You want to be remembered as a person who delivers.

Ways to Grow

Your Current Job

This is the most effective way. People really value coworkers they previously enjoyed working with. Of course, you have to be that coworker. Offer help. Offer feedback. Unblock. Support. Be generous with your time.

When I worked at Shopify as a Staff Engineer, I had more 1:1s than my manager. Shopify is a really big organization, and I wanted to engage and collaborate with many brilliant engineers. I had three types of 1:1 meetings:

My teammates. In some companies with heavy processes, you may end up talking to your teammates all the time. Especially if you work in the same location. In other places, especially remote, it’s not always the case. So, make sure you spend enough face-to-face time and genuinely try to be helpful.
My mentees. Shopify had an official mentorship program, but I also unofficially started mentoring more junior engineers. Just because I recognized the potential and wanted to help.
My peers. Staff and Senior Staff engineers who were responsible for other parts of the Data Platform. Some were in different departments. I wanted to stay up-to-date on major initiatives (ideally try to influence them), and offer my help in aligning and unblocking major projects.

Some of these relationships really paid out: when I joined the next company as a Founding Engineer, I built my team exclusively from the folks I previously worked with and mentored.

Also, this might be another reason to switch jobs. I’m not proposing job hopping, but the math is hard to beat: working in 3 places 3-4 years each will generally grow your network much faster than staying in one place for 10 years.

Events

Conferences and meetups are really powerful ways to meet people you’ve never interacted with before. I’m an introvert, but I still find these events really useful. In retrospect, they made a huge impact on my career.

And again, many engineers don’t really know how to properly attend these events if they want to grow their network.

First of all, you’re not there to watch talks. Most conferences nowadays record their talks; they’ll be available for watching later. There are only a few reasons to spend your time on someone's talk:

The content is extremely relevant for you right now, and you can’t wait a few weeks for the recordings to be available.
You want to support the presenter and engage them after the talk.
You’re planning to write a post about the conference :)

So what do you do instead? You go to the “hallway track”: a place where most of the people hang out outside of the talks. Generally, something like an expo hall.

Start talking to people. Introduce yourself, but don’t talk about you all the time! You are there to listen. Ask about people’s challenges. And when you get enough information, offer to help. Offer to try their product. Offer to provide feedback. Offer to go over their problem yourself, or introduce them to someone else who can help. See The Most Important Rule again - be helpful!

If you already offer a service (maybe part-time), you can come much more prepared.

Many fancy conferences these days show attendees in their apps. So, do your homework and analyze them. Find people from relevant companies, write them down. You can even reach out before the event and say something like “Hey X! I noticed you’ll be at the event Y in two weeks, and it looks like your company Z does a lot of N. I’m really curious about your opinion on N, do you think you can find 20 minutes to chat?”

If there is no attendee list, you can do the same thing for the speakers. Thankfully, they’re always public. By the way, try to become one! Identify the list of events you’d like to speak at and regularly submit proposals. If you get chosen as a speaker, ask your company to sponsor your travel. Being a speaker is a great way to meet a lot of interesting people quickly:

You may get invited to speaker-only dinners/parties. I met Martin Fowler in Budapest at an event like that.
You become recognizable on the floor - people will want to meet you. In some cases, they’ll line up with questions after your talk!

Also, don’t forget to find time to check in with people you already know! Just a minute with a friendly face goes a long way.

Community

You can’t always visit events; travelling can be hard and expensive. But likely, there are people in your community you’d like to connect with. So, just message them! If they’re local, offer to meet for a coffee. If not, offer to hang out over a call. It’s not as creepy as it sounds if you follow The Most Important Rule - offer to help with something. The worst thing that can happen? They’ll ghost you.

Your community can be anywhere: social media, Slack groups, development mailing lists, open-source maintainers, Reddit, etc.

The Many Ways Software Engineers Can Go Independent

Yaroslav Tkachenko — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 06:05:43 +0000

When I talk about software engineers becoming solopreneurs, it’s typically interpreted in one of these ways:

You bootstrap a small SaaS or development tool product.
You start freelancing.
You become a consultant, helping companies in something you deeply specialize in.

But the reality is more diverse (and also messy). There are many more opportunities. Most importantly, you don’t need to limit yourself to one thing: you can bet on multiple options at the same time.

I’m going to try to cover all of the different ways you can go independent. In some cases, the definitions are not fully established yet, but I’ll do my best to describe them.

Services

This is where you sell your time. Your income directly depends on the amount of time you’re willing to spend.

I know freelancing immediately comes to mind for many people. Freelancing can mean slightly different things, but I define it as project-based work that doesn’t necessarily require extensive experience or a particular skillset. Historically (and it’s probably still the case today), freelancing was a way for companies to save money: instead of hiring someone full-time, just hire a freelancer to deliver a project. It’s typically a low-engagement activity (it’s possible you don’t even talk to a freelancer). I recommend avoiding it if possible.

Instead, position yourself as a consultant. An expert in a certain domain. Unfortunately, it’s hard to become a consultant at the beginning of your career; first, you need to put in the hours. But as a result, you’ll be able to sell your services at a rate that’s higher than that of a full-time employee.

There are different types of consulting engagements:

Retainers. Typically, you make a commitment for a client to dedicate 10-30 hours a week. You can be pretty embedded in a team (see fractional below) or work on solo projects.
Project deliverables. You’re hired to deliver a certain project. The hours can really fluctuate, but they’re not as important as shipping the final result.
Productized services. Similar to project deliverables, but based on what you offer. For example, you may offer a security audit, a performance investigation, or a cloud cost audit. These can be relevant for many different companies.

You may have also heard about roles that start with “ Fractional ”: Fractional CTO, Fractional CFO, Fractional Data Architect, Fractional ML Engineer, etc. To me, that generally sounds like a Consultant with a retainer who’s tightly integrated with the team.

Matthias Endler (Corrode) is a great example of a software engineer turning consultant.

Products

This is where you sell your products. Your income DOES NOT directly depend on the amount of time you’re willing to spend.

Historically, during the SaaS boom, many engineers began building small SaaS products. It sounds simple: find a niche, build something useful and start monetizing it. The reality can be much more challenging, especially when you’re bootstrapping it solo.

In the past few years, I noticed the explosion of development tooling, either with subscription pricing or licensing. Developers can be a tough crowd to sell to, but if you nail the developer experience and build something useful, you can definitely conquer a market segment.

Another popular way to sell products is through marketplaces : custom themes, plugins, etc. I heard about successful businesses specializing in Shopify plugins, for example.

Michael Drogalis (ShadowTraffic) is a great example of a software engineer building a development tool product.

Education

I decided to make this a separate section, but practically, you end up either selling your time (services) or building an educational resource (products). My reason to keep it separate: in the case of services or products above, your goal is still software engineering. But here the goal shifts to teaching others about software engineering.

I believe that a straightforward way to start is using the knowledge you gained from building a product or a service. If the product is successful, or your consulting practice has a lot of happy customers, there is a high chance that some things you learned along the way can be useful to others.

There are a few different types of offerings here:

Training (a service). Can be online or offline. Typically, you work with a team or company. Some amount of customization is possible.
Bootcamp (a service). Generally, a public program. Can be a few intense days or 6-8-10 weeks of ~hourly sessions + homework.
Online course (a product). On-demand resource.

An important realization: the same content can be used for any of these!

Mentoring or coaching is another option. It’s typically done in a 1:1 format, although I’ve had experience with team mentoring as well. Websites like MentorCruise can be a good way to start.

I’m going to use myself as an example here: I launched Data Streaming Academy a few months ago.

Crowdfunding

I’m still not sure if crowdfunding is the right word, but it’s the best I could come up with. GitHub sponsorships. Patreon subscriptions. Paid newsletters. Paid communities. All of these are also applicable to software engineers.

GitHub sponsorship is a big one. If you work on a popular project, there is a high chance that many companies (and users) are willing to support you. Starting from scratch can be really challenging, though.

Paid newsletters really exploded in the last few years (thanks to Substack). I acknowledge that regular writing is not something that every software engineer enjoys doing, but it’s an important skill to master anyway. Finding the right niche can be tricky: keep your topics very generic and you get a lot of competition, keep your topics hyper-specialized, and you get a very small audience.

Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer) is a great example of a software engineer turning newsletter author.

Products > Services?

Some entrepreneurs position services as a level below products. I’ve seen this take: first, you build your skills, network and a strong services business; then you build another level on top of that, and productionize your skills as a product. It can be an educational product, like an online course or a SaaS / development tool product.

The reasoning here is simple: there are only so many hours in a day, and your income as a solopreneur is limited if you only offer services. And product income doesn’t directly depend on the number of hours you invest in it.

But I find products much harder to build. Finding product market fit is hard. Marketing and sales matter much more. In the end, you need to balance income and happiness, and many people prefer to stick to consulting (and other services) because it’s a somewhat simpler path.

Growing a Business

It’s possible to turn almost all the paths I identified in this post into bigger businesses.

If you have a successful consulting business and strong client demand, you can start hiring employees and dividing the work. Eventually you can focus on the business side of things 100%, if you want.

Having a strong, profitable product with an established market fit can be a great target for many VC firms. However, not all businesses can be VC-funded: some, by design, don’t assume rapid growth.

Instead of a Summary

If you started a consulting business, it doesn’t mean you can’t also launch a product. Or vice versa. Building a consulting business with a big network makes it possible to turn some knowledge into an online course or a training.

There are really no rules here. Everyone is trying to figure out what they’re good at and what’s interesting for others.

But what I like most about this journey is that you don’t need to ask for permission. Every day, you just try to figure out the next most important thing to address. Small steps compound over time.