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Developing your brand as a software developer

Projected Time

30-45 minutes

Prerequisites

Motivation

  • Your personal brand is your way to distinguish yourself from others and make yourself memorable.
  • Having a distinct and relevant personal brand can help employers identify you as a good fit for their open roles, or can help you build credibility with colleagues and managers as you further your career.
  • It is worth the investment to think outside the box and develop a brand that will help employers get to know you.

What is an example of a great personal brand? Test your knowledge about Techtonica founder Michelle Glauser. Did you learn something new and impressive?

Objectives

  • Understand importance of a personal brand when embarking on a new career
  • Set up your own site or blog to start sharing your learning

Specific Things To Learn

  • Using Twitter—following, tweeting, blocking, and muting
  • Tips for blogging
  • Tips for being social through GitHub

Materials

Lesson

  1. Follow this guide to create a personal blog on Medium.

  2. Spend a few minutes reading "How to win friends and stand out from the crowd". This page will help you to make new friends and grow your Network.

  • Choose your lane
    • Pick something you have learned or love and go deep in explanations
    • Join a community
  • Make Friends
    • Get involved on Twitter and GitHub
  • Share your experience
    • Blog
    • Tweet
    • Speak
  1. Control your dialogue
  • Use Twitter—following, tweeting, blocking.
    • We recommend using Twitter's reply controls to prevent trolls from replying to your tweets.
    • Use Block Party to filter out unwanted @mentions from Twitter, and continue to use Twitter as normal.

Common Mistakes / Misconceptions

  • Most new developers feel they need to be an expert at something before they can share on a topic. The irony is, there are not lots of free beginner content out there for new developer geared towards new developers and the same new developers are in the best position to teach each other today. No matter how new you are, there is someone who knows less than you and you are in the best position to teach them.

Guided Practice

  • Follow this tutorial to create your own blog on Medium!
  • You can add a profile README on your Github when you create a repository with a name that matches your Github username. Take a look at some examples and follow the tutorials to set up a profile README.

Independent Practice

Take some time this week to write a blog post on something you learned this week. Before posting to the world, have a fellow classmate review it to see if the information is useful. A typical suggestion is to blog for yourself 3-6 months ago.

Ship it and continue this process at least once a week. Remember to keep the blog post short at first to prevent writers block and anxiety about posting.

Promoting your blog is at least as important as writing it!

Challenge

Tweet out about your new blog on Twitter using the #BridgeTheTechGap or #CodeNewbie hashtag.

Check for Understanding

Send your first blog post to a peer and ask for comments and 2 ways you can improve your post or your site.

Supplemental Resources

  • templates.netlify.com - List a variety of website templates.
  • codenewbie - A community for new coders that provides various resources and help, including a slack group.

Check for Understanding

  • What are the benefits of having a distinct Personal Brand?
  • How do you build a Personal Brand?
  • Mention some blog hosting sites.
  • Mention some communities you would like to join.