This post was originally posted on my blog
Learning in public
In the last post we discovered what we can do to become more visible. A lot of the things mentioned are connected to the "Learning in public" or "Working in public" movement. Learning in public is describing the process of sharing what and how you learn, while you’re actually doing it. This can be done by writing blog posts, speaking at meetups, writing a newsletter or recording online videos. You can read this blog posts that goes even deeper into that topic.
Leveraging social media
After creating something, whether it's a video, an article or a newsletter, we need to find a way to share it with many people as possible. This is where social media comes in play. Not everyone likes to spend their time on social media. However, in terms of developer careers, I noticed that it can be hugely beneficial. I got my current job by announcing that I was looking for a new opportunity on Twitter and various companies reached out to me. Similar things happened to many other developers I know, who are active on social media and got their jobs that way.
Twitter is great if you want to keep up-to-date with the latest technology news and gossip. It’s a great platform to directly interact with people in the tech community and bigger brands. If you already have some blog posts or side projects to show, it can be great place to share your current work there.
Reddit has a huge developer community and different subreddits for all kinds of specific topics. If you're learning Javascript, check out the /learnjavascript subbreddit, into datascience, join the /datascience subbreddit, doing rust, go talk to people on the /rust subrredit. Reddit is a great place to find people or communities from a specific technological specialty.
Youtube
Although youtube often is not seen as a social network, you can find a lot of developer communities and learning content there. From LearnCode.academy, Eli the Computer Guy or Derek Banas, there are a lot of successful youtubers out there that share programming knowledge with their communities.
Discord / Slack
If you are interested in some very specific technology or framework, it’s very likely that there will be a discord or slack channel dedicated to just that thing. These chat channels are a great place to get help or just to meet other people doing the same things.
Dev.to
Dev.to is one of the newer platforms, that is also gaining a lot of popularity. Many beginners enjoy it, because it's super easy to start blogging without the need for your own website. You can build a nice personal profile and link your blog posts to specific tags. This makes it easy to find your content and connect with other people having similar interests.
Conclusion
Starting to show your work in public can be intimidating and there will definitely be moments where someone will discourage you or there is no feedback at all. However, if you keep going, you will see that it's a great way to meet new people and get better at what you do. People will start asking you questions and see you as an inspiration for their own work. Just keep trying what works and doesn't work for you and in the long term, you will gain more contacts and opportunities to grow.
Exercise 7 - Learning in public
Find three people, who are highly engaged in the area you currently are learning. Write them down and also write down, what they do that particularly interests you and seems to work.
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