Sharing your creativity as a coder and getting discovered could be a superpower in this fast-paced and continuously evolving age of IT whether you are looking for a job or starting your own business.
“Find your voice, shout it from the rooftops, and keep doing it until the people that are looking for you find you.”
— Dan Harmon
Here are a few ways to get started:
- Document your work: “Become a documentarian of what you do”. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Shoot videos/take photographs of you working/coding. Whether you share it or not, documenting and recording your process as you go along has its own rewards: You’ll start to see the work you’re doing more clearly and feel like you’re making progress. And when you’re ready to share, you’ll have a surplus of material to choose from.
- Teach what you know: Learning and teaching always go hand in hand. The more you teach, the more you learn. You don’t have to be a genius or expert to teach the tools and technologies you know, to beginners in the field. Pick any social media platform and start sharing everyday small tips and tricks that you have learned throughout your experience. There is always someone looking for some help around troubleshooting little issues to developing or designing whole new features and your little contributions can make a big difference.
- Collaborate and Contribute: The software industry has grown fast today just because of the giant open-source software we have like React, Postgres, and many more. Open-source projects have a tendency to produce very high-quality projects, and help to build a community around the technology that drives the tools to higher levels, beyond what’s possible with proprietary solutions. Therefore, contributing to open-source software e.g. on Github can be extremely beneficial to you as a developer and strengthen the community we have.
- Keep LinkedIn up-to-date: Professionals for some strange reason like LinkedIn more than any other platform and your profile on LinkedIn acts as your CV nowadays. Recruiters, collaborators, and others will know about your career aspirations “what you show” on LinkedIn. We as humans tend to forget things and if you will not keep your LinkedIn professional descriptions updated regularly you might end up forgetting what tech stack you worked on in your last role or something you have learned recently from your personal project.
- Create a portfolio website: You can lose access to your GitHub account but you can never lose access to your own portfolio website. Your personal website will speak about your skills itself.
“Carving out a space for yourself online, somewhere where you can express yourself and share your work, is still one of the best possible investments you can make with your time.”
— Andy Baio
To learn more and dive deeper into this, I would recommend reading the book; “Show your work”.
I would love to hear from you, what are your key takeaways from this post in the comment section below.
