While those in more traditional roles can rely on LinkedIn and traditional resumes to advertise their experience and showcase themselves for potential new work, programmers and developers more often use demonstrative (and honestly, fun) ways to show their competencies and potential. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the best ways to show your work, not just to engage in reflection about what you’ve learned and how far you’ve come, but to effectively engage those who might be interested in someone just like yourself and what you know.
This is the most obvious but perhaps one of the most effective ways developers can engage with those interested in working with them. It’s a chance for you to show your personality as well. Here are three sites that we particularly liked:
All of these developers are providing great insights into who they are personally and professionally. One thing that can really distinguish you from the crowd is a storytelling component for the portfolio pages that shares your thoughts on how the project developed and what challenges you ran into, as Adham did for a recent project he did for Qantas. The story is clean, well-told, and chock-full of visuals to elucidate his points.
Gary Vaynerchuk has spent years transforming from the “guy who drinks wine on YouTube” to be a major influencer, investor, and head of a media and marketing firm. One of his favorite themes is to “document, document, document.” In addition to (or in lieu of) traditional blogging, as we saw on the websites above, he advocates for a strong presence on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and the like, regardless of your profession. He thinks that content is king and by giving away great content generously, you’ll find an ever increasing pool of opportunities. We found two developers (though there are many more) with YouTube channels who are offering great content.
Both of these developers have Patreon pages attached to their work so they have monetized something originally oriented just around sharing value (something that Gary Vee touts as one possible result of just giving without counting the cost), thus adding an additional income stream to their regular development work, as well as giving an outlet to their creative energies that helps others.
Helping others is at the heart of a final way we think developers can show their work.Stack Overflow: a site is focused on questions and answers. You can ask specific questions about problems that you are running into in your developing and programming and find answers from the community. Questions themselves get voted on (as to coherence and relevance) and then answers are voted up or down, earning the answers reputation and badges in the process. Should you want more expansive (or more philosophical) questions and answers, Quora is also a great place to contribute and learn.Github: a well-known community for developers. You can fork an existing project (take what has already been done and start working on your own version). If you really like what you’ve done on your fork, you can create a pull request so that the original authors can see your work and decide whether to accept it into the original project. Throughout the process there’s a social networking component to allow discussion of everything that is going on.
We’ve been talking a lot about showcasing and sharing, but we haven’t been using the term “settle” because the very nature of development and programming implies constant improvement and progress. Moore’s Law is just as true in this space (perhaps more) than in other fields of tech and in five years half of what you know will be obsolete. While it’s ideal to have a website, some kind of channel where you can teach, and a presence on sites where you can share your knowledge, even just one of these can help you stand out and snag that next project (having a presence on Vocaworks wouldn’t hurt either!).