Abdessalam Benharira

Posted on Apr 8, 2020 • Updated on May 22, 2021 • Originally published at abdessalam.dev

Work on your personal branding as a developer

Personal branding has become very important both personally and professionally in order to highlight your personality, your values and your skills. This approach seems very important to recruiters since it allows them to differentiate you from your competitors. We will see through this article "What is personal branding and how to work on it as a developer?"

What is personal branding?

Personal branding or personal marketing is an approach which consists in enhancing your image and skills through the marketing techniques usually used to promote a brand. Your reputation, your credibility, your career, your professionalism are all part of personal branding. To summarize well and take up what Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon says:

Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room

Build your personal branding

I will list some points that I think are important in the development of personal branding as a developer.

Develop your brand identity around a field that you master

The main idea is to position yourself in a field, but above all it is a question of defining what you like to do the most and what you are good at. As an expert in your field, you will be able to advise and provide your opinion on the various subjects.

Write some content on a blog

In my opinion, every developer should have a blog. There are several reasons for this. A blog can be a source of leads and the place where you will have an audience interested in your content. A blog allows you to express your ideas, to show your work, your discoveries and your expertise. It also allows you to gain visibility by appearing in the first google results if the content is relevant and responds to a certain request.

Be present on social networks

When we want to learn more about a person, a company or a brand, the first thing that we do spontaneously is to go on the Internet and try to find informations, we talk about e-reputation. The e-reputation brings together several points, we will mainly focus in social networks. In personal branding, it is important to consider social networks, it is through this that you publish content every week, every month or simply on a regular rhythm. In addition, by subscribing to some accounts, you will always be aware of news related to your field (technology watch). Also a detail and not the least, it is thanks to social networks that you convey the image you want and therefore have an effect on the way you are perceived by others. To be as close as possible to your community, it is really important to focus on sharing, answering questions and comments, in other words, interacting with others.

The main networks I use for example are Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Stack Overflow, Instagram, DEV Community, Product Hunt.

Attend talks and meetups

Whether it is talks or meetups on soft skills, good practices, new framework... These events are very interesting since they are a very good opportunity to learn about different subjects and get to know people with the same interest as you and with different technical backgrounds. A very good opportunity to develop your personal or professional network.

Promote and discuss about your work

You have to try to be as active as possible on GitHub, CodePen, Dribbble or even your own portfolio by working on side projects, which will be useful for yourself and for others. The idea is to see new concepts and the constraints that a project can impose during its development. You can also contribute to open source projects and help other developers by sharing your knowledge. We must not forget that teaching others is an effective learning strategy to strengthen or deepen some acquired knowledges or even new things.

Do hackathons and code challenges

A hackathon is an event that brings together teams (developers, UI/UX designers, marketers...) where the goal is to develop a project, which is generally an application, a software, a platform answering a specific problem... This project must be developed over a given period, a day, a night or a weekend. For code challenges, it is the same principle but the idea is most often to solve exercises online. These two types of challenge are a good way to learn, to make yourself known to other developers and to establish again a personal or professional network with which you will maybe work with in the future.

Be a brand or company ambassador

To make it simple, in marketing, an ambassador is a person who promotes a brand, a product or a company spontaneously. For my part, I was ambassador for Orange Start-up/Viva Technology for two years and this allowed me to have open doors to several opportunities. Being an ambassador is a real plus that clearly boosts your CV. This shows that you have taken the time for these types of initiatives and acquired some soft skills. An important element to stand out during a job interview.

Before you leave…
Thanks for reading! 😊