While listening to Software Engineering Daily #245 on my ride in this morning John Sonmez was talking about the need to market yourself as a developer. One of the primary examples he talked about was starting a blog, so, here we are.
John’s point was that you should start a blog as a mechanism of marketing yourself and building a name in the industry. I know that my opinion of “how great it must be to work for X” is shaped by the quality and frequency of their engineering blog posts. Why would it be any different for individuals?
Having spent many years on interview rotation across several companies I am brutally aware of just how little light a resume sheds on the quality of a candidate. Chances are also high that as a software engineer you suck at writing a resume. It’s just not a skill we focus our time on, and that’s OK. That’s where a blog, Github, Twitter, etc can come in to fill the gap.
Starting a blog is something I’ve given at least 10-15 seconds of thought on a few occasions over the years. I’ve learned and found answers to problems through the blog posts of other developers sharing their work and experiences so it seemed only fair that I should have a venue to give back to the community. Also, living in a small community the value of having a good self-brand built up seems like a good investment especially given the low cost.
At least, that’s the theory…
In the meantime you can find me on Twitter @BurDotNet and GitHub.
Bur.net 