As a developer in 2017, it’s important to have some form of online presence. This could be a GitHub (see my recent post), a blog, a vlog or simply just a Twitter account. I think gone are the days of Gamertags and secret online identities, and those acting as their true selves online, giving real, justified opinions, earn more respect. Subsequently having better careers as a result. Developers are makers by nature, but this doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) apply to just code, so creating content online to assist your career is well worth having a go at.
So, what, as a developer could you create for online? Twitter is trivial, LinkedIn you probably already know about and GitHub we’ve talked about. But how about a blog? A blog is a great way to share your long-form thoughts and they’re very easy to set up.
Getting Started with Blogging
“But Sam”, you ask, “What do I write about? I’m a junior, I don’t know anything yet?”. Exactly.
You need to document your learnings, not create advice for others based on what you’ve learnt. Stop reading here, and go watch Gary Vaynerchuk’s Document, Don’t Create video.
Back? Ready to start? Cool. Just go to Wordpress.com or Medium.com (OR THIS WEBSITE!) and start typing. What are you learning at the moment? For example, I was learning Elixir recently (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Simply document your journey as a developer learning more and more. As you learn something, you’ll most like have some really interesting discussions with people also familiar with the topic, and that’s the really awesome part of being online – talking to strangers about cool stuff you both like! Employers will read this and think to themselves “wow, this person really likes X, and is making an effort to learn.” It’s easy to say you’ve done some reading on X, but if you have a blog post and a GitHub project to back those few hours of learning up, it’s so much more believable. Plus, writing about it really solidifies your learning, in the same way writing a talk does.
Consider Distribution
Creating not really your thing? Try distribution as well or instead. Find any good links recently? Share them! Distribute what inspires you. Write an entry every week or so of your top 10 links you found and a few sentences about what you got out of them. Some people call these Newsletters (PS, I love Charged!). Once again, It’s great to say you follow HackerNews or r/Programming, but have you really ingested the content, enough to form your own opinion on it? What do you think? What would you have done in that situation? What’s your take? Once again, the immediate benefit to you is comprehension of the content, and the benefit to others is a digest and summary of content they might not have time for.
Your Audience
So, you’re coding, reading and writing, and sharing a bit online, but who is your audience? Well, start simple, and start with your friends. They’ll hopefully be able to understand the content you’re putting out and give you feedback on it to improve. Once you’ve done that for a few months, you may have the courage to post to Reddit or Hacker News. There’s really no downside to this, but the chances of harsher critique are higher. Prepare for that, it can be very off putting, but it’s worth trying to get to the root of the critique and take it onboard.
As for a platform, if you’re writing for developers, you need to post your content to the places of the internet where developers go for developer stuff. This would be r/Programming (or a more specific subreddit), Hacker News, HackerNoon.com, Twitter and Slack groups. You probably won’t have much luck on Snapchat, Instagram, but that’s not to say these platforms aren’t good for showing off a bit of your human side (also, send me pictures of your pets please).
Keep it Human
No one likes a robot’s writing and commenting, so do inject a bit of personality into your content. Obviously, anyone can document learning about X and first impressions, so what makes your content stand out is you and your personality, and that’s what people keep coming back to. The nature of your online presence counts. Sometimes, this online presence can be known as a Personal Brand. And while that sounds like a logo and some graphics, it really isn’t. It’s about being an authentic you and treating others how you would like to be treated.
Keep it respectful
As a warning – It is as important to conduct yourself online the same the way you conduct yourself in person or with colleagues. I believe it is important to maintain an online personality consistent with the most respectful form of yourself and your passions. What you create and post online are hard to remove and hard to be forgotten, and anything you post may come back to bite you. More and more now, people (and employers) are using your online presence to judge a person and their personality and likeability. What we see of you online is important, so do think before you post.
I hope this has encouraged you to give content creating online a go. I’m, of course, happy to help in any way I can as well. If you want to read a bit more, the boot that really got me off my butt and start taking blogging serious was Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Crush It!”. While a few years old now, it’s still a great, short read. If you do end up making something, I’d really love to see it! Good luck!
This is the 7th post in my Junior Developer Diaries blog series. I’m writing more every week, and you can sign up to hear more and read previous posts on my website.
Top comments (106)
Super great post, Sam. I'll also add, if it's not clear, that dev.to is a tremendous resource for building an online presence. We also have a new feature coming soon that will be especially helpful for junior devs navigating their early careers, and it will be helpful to have a filled out dev.to profile with maybe a few comments of posts published 😉
Totally agree Ben! Dev.to is amazing <3 (I should really get some stickers eh?)
I'd love to hear when the new feature is out. Keep me posted.
And once again, thank you and your team for running Dev.to! We all really appreciate the work you do, and I bet you don't hear it as much as you deserve. <3
Hi Sam,
I also share your views on how to build a Online Presence and I've been (not so steadily) doing some of those things myself.
As Ben noticed, dev.to is a great place to create and share our content as developers.
That's why I'll be moving from Medium ~> here :)
Would it make sense to edit your post and mention dev.to in it?
Totally would! I think this was one of my first posts to Dev.To, and I've since really seen the awesome value. So yes, I will edit ~
Thanks so much!
Hey Ben I guess its time you make a tutorial on how to build a blog in rails ?
I found out that when I blog about something I am learning, I am retaining a lot more information about whatever I am writing about. I mean, it's not even close. I wrote something on my blog about streams in NodeJS a few months ago, and even if I barely used them since them, I remember a lot more about streams than things I use way more frequently.
Teaching is the best way to learn as they say. Well, when you write about what you learn, you have to express your ideas in words. It's very different from just thinking you 'got it'.
So yeah, this is the main thing I found out thanks to blogging, I just remember things a lot better.
Totally agree Damien. Learn, code, learn, write, teach, learn...learn... etc! Great for information retention, and great to move from unconsciously incompetent through to consciously competent.
Very nice post! I wanted to start creating an online presence a while ago as part of a portfolio, but never had inspiration or any subject to write about. As you suggested, I'll try and document my learning path, including some snippets learned during my study.
Thanks for the tips!
No worries Mark, thanks for the comment! :D Best of luck.
Thank you! I plan on having a running site pretty soon, so we'll see :)
Super Great Read I really like this article, I've been on the same journey and I'm not super sure what to write about? You gave me some good ideas and suggestions, I've put out some short comments on Medium both nothing with any real content. This gave me some new ideas to try. :thuumbsup: :smiley:
Thanks for the comment Peter! I'm super super thrilled to hear I can help! Please get in touch with your writing once you start - I'd love to take a read. Best of luck.
Oh, and isn't it annoying that :slack: emoji shorthand doesn't work everywhere? haha.
Hey Barry!
Yup, post it wherever you like! Medium is also another good place. However, I think dev.to will be a nice place to post it, the community here is pretty friendly and will give you advice and feedback if you ask for it
This is a Super Awesome blog post with lots of good advice!
I love Gary Vaynerchuk! You're the first Software Engineer that I've come across who follows him as well! I'm reading/listening to "Jab Jab Right hook" now. After I'm going to read the "Crush it!" book because of your recommendation. :-)
Thanks, Sal!
Yeah, he's a pretty cool guy. I think some people jump to assume his advice is a bit too high level or abstracted, but once you take that and actually apply it, things become clearer.
Crush It! is great - I do have JJJRH, but I've yet to start it!
Great post!
I found when starting out, all this was really intimidating. Setting a goal to do 1 thing in public per month works well. After a few months, you have a few things to show! 😀
(Also I consider going to a meet up and talking to 1 person as counting) 😀
Great approach Mike! Keep it up!
Thanks for the pieces of advice that you wrote in this article, I've really enjoyed it and I'm going to try to do this.
I've thought for a long time about "what can I write in a blog without enough knowledge?" but i was encouraged by your post.
PD: I apologize for my english, I'm learning and trying to practice.
You are very welcome :) English is good!
thanks
A good post and I agree that juniors should blog but a warning:
Avoid negative opinions on technology because possible future employers will see it.
I was hiring for C# .NET backend and 2 of the junior CVs I was sent had blog URLs. One of them had a blog post claiming that Microsoft was protectionist and evil; published just after they had open sourced all of .NET. The other was complaining that no-one should code in C# because JavaScript had "won". There was no nuance, no backup, no logical reasoning, nothing. I didn't even bother interviewing either of them.
Those sorts of conversations are fine in the pub on a Friday but if you're going to publish them online then you need to back up those opinions with something solid.
Positive opinions don't carry the same weight. "Rust is great" won't scare off employers.
Also if you self host your own blog, to me that carries more kudos because it shows you bought a domain, got a server running, installed the packages you need, setup SSL and learnt a whole lot more while doing that. Don't make that as a barrier to start, though, just write!
Totally agree, Rob! That's a great warning to call out. I'd would also love to see something like "I found aspect X of C# challenging because I hadn't seen it before" rather than "C# sucks wah wah wah".
Agree also on the set up your own blog part but yeah, Dev.To/Medium/etc is just too easy, maybe that developer shows that all important skill of pragmatism? :P (I host my website on squarespace for this reason ;) )
Thank you sam. It was my biggest problem you just solved it very simple way.
You're very Welcome, Bikram! Tweet me anything you end up writing :)
sure i will.