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How to Build Your Online Presence as a Developer

Mangabo Kolawole on September 22, 2024

When entering a career, you have to find something that makes you competitive—something that makes someone say, "Hey, I want to hire this person so...
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Stasi Vladimirov

Any reason you skipped over GitHub? I feel like building a following on GitHub via some open source contributions and creating packages, frameworks and apps can go a long way in gaining respect and popularity in the dev community.

Another one that I think is missing is a personal website. Many of the well known developers have their own website where they promote projects, blog articles and share opinions about important topics and issues

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Mangabo Kolawole

Yes, those are definitely interesting 🤔 I would prefer a Github as with a README, you can easily have something that can serve as a portfolio exposing your work.

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harshit_lakhani • Edited

I completely agree with you. In a world where many present overstated or exaggerated skills, we decided to take a different approach.

we wanted to showcase our real abilities, so we created an open-source project to let our work speak for itself. It's great to see some traction so far, and we're constantly learning through this journey. This approach helps us build genuine trust and credibility within the community by focusing on authentic contributions.

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Gleb Kotovsky • Edited

Great take about github and personal website. The personal website can be used as the main hub for all your work / social links and etc

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click2install

Don't churn content for the sake of it, there's more than enough terrible content already and only getting worse by the day. You only need an online presence if you want one. If you're doing it to get a job, forget it. Most hiring managers, or at least those worth their salt, won't care they'll be more interested in seeing some of your code and how you approach a problem opposed to seeing you active in multiple different places. Do what you enjoy and show that if you need examples.

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

that's a fair approach too

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Justyn Clark

Nice article. But I'll say, as a senior software engineer with over a decade of professional experience at big and small companies working with diverse colleagues from around the world BEFORE the AI invasion and BEFORE week long coding bootcamps I've witnessed this trend of new aspiring developers writing "Don't Do...", "Stop Using..." click bait articles because they don't have any real world experience or have any high quality personal projects to share.

I've interviewed dozens of candidates and never once ever considered one better because of a bunch of articles in a sea of already bad content that keeps getting worse.

However, I understand and been there before not having real world experience in my junior days and all these new platforms make it easy to publish stuff to create an image but at the end of the day skill comes from experience and experience comes from experience.

One thing I've done over the years is keep my work from the "close to real world" take home assignment repos in my GitHub to share and reference in situations where someone wanted to see code versus the introductory To-Do app.

Happy coding fam!

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Benoit COUETIL 💫

I'll go even further : if his content has already been posted a gazillion times, I would be tempted to dismiss him as a candidate...

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Mohammed Samgan Khan

You should also try pinkary.com. It's a growing social media platform for developers by developers.

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

this looks nice actually. thanks for sharing Mohammed

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leob profile image
leob

Had never heard of it, interesting!

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msamgan profile image
Mohammed Samgan Khan

It's upcoming. Soon, it will be among one of the best ones.

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Martin Baun

I'm a dev and founder and I've got a presence. It's great for forming connections with other creators in the programming/development niche. If you're good at it you can get quite some business too!

Appreciate these tips!

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

Yes, I got a lot of contracts regarding technical writing and software engineering following those tips.

Thanks for appreciating my work

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Domenico Tenace

Nice article, a great guide to get started!

I currently use LinkedIn, Dev.to and Medium for writing, and GitHub for share my projects and help other developers.
They are giving me good results, but it takes more time.

Sometimes, I write on Twitter and Mastodon.

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

that's great. i never used Mastodon but I hear people talking a lot about the platform. i will give a look

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dvalin99 profile image
Domenico Tenace

The concept of the Fediverse is beautiful in general!

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Vadym Yaroshchuk

Quite useful article, as for me, I was kinda succesful at some point of growing on LinkedIn, but to be honest, it's a platform of most unhonest people who comment and post just to increase their SSI with almost no interesting things.

It's hard to compete there if you're trying to make a quality, not a quantity. And I am not even mentioning too obvious usage of ChatGPT.

I am planning to get back to the LinkedIn and try something on other platforms, so great to have this article with some references, bcz tbh it's hard to find where's to start

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

Few years ago, you could only post 2 times per week and it would be enough. Now with AI and more people posting there, it seems you have to post a lot. However, I noticed that video content actually does pretty well there.

thanks for sharing your experience

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Vadym Yaroshchuk

In addition, totally agree about pressure: quite important thing to avoid, I couldn't do anything apart creating posts for LinkedIn that would be at least not trash just to post something

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leob profile image
leob

Great article - informative, and fun to read!

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

thank you leob

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arshir profile image
Fareed

Quite an interesting content. Skills not marketed will be redundant in this era of online presence race. You hit the nail on the head. Thank you.

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

yes. thank you for reading Fareed

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الیاس ملک

Your words are different from the social reality through focus writing and you describe it in a soulful way, which is likened to a writer as a story writer.

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laurielylourenco profile image
lauriely lourenço

Cool! This type of content is what I was looking for. I believe that many devs want to appear on social media to promote themselves

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Tatjana

Nice post! I currently started to publish articles here on dev.to and also in my GitHub, to collect all the different things I know. I also thought about LinkedIn, but it is to bustling for me. :D

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Mangabo Kolawole

Haha XD

thanks for the appreciation about my article.

just feel free to go hard on LinkedIn when you feel ready

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Debopriyo Ghosh

Great article . I will try to follow the steps.

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

Thank you Debopriyo. Let me know how it works for you

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brightoibe

Interesting article. Thank you. I just joined dev.to and will love to write more and more not to go viral because the more I write the more I gain more insights.

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Mangabo Kolawole

That’s great. The more you write, the more you will learn about an article that can go viral. Don’t press yourself about it.

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Abdulmumin yaqeen

I think I'm pretty OK with my articles here on dev.to, but Im not at all consistent with pursuing an audience.

I want to improve on this, but my plan is non existence 😅.

Thanks for this!

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

that's okay too
take your time and do it if you want to

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Gaurav Choudhary

Does dev.to pays anything ?

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

No, but it has great SEO. If your articles are doing well too, you can have paid affiliate links. Just make sure to tell it to your readers.

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Gaurav Choudhary

If it is not providing something to creators then why do any creator will prefer this.

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

i think that because there is some pro when it comes to SEO. i have many articles that are relatively well referenced. Also, the community here is interesting

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gaundergod profile image
Gleb Kotovsky

Super article, I'll be going back to it several times for sure. Take care man

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Mangabo Kolawole

thanks man. take care of you too

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dataalgorithm profile image
dataalgorithm

Having a good portfolio on top 10 main platform will help you growing a professional developer.

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

definitely

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Prathmesh Jagtap

I would like to add one more platform which I think is great among all these platforms, that not only increases your engagement, it also connects you with a lot of experts
Here is the tool daily.dev

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George Sokianos

I value a lot the GitHub projects of the person I have to interview. If they actually have their own, original projects or contribute to others, it shows to me that they try to help a broader group of people, and they might do it as part of their daily job.

If the only thing I see there are repositories of small exercise projects, requested by companies' onboard process, that works on the opposite side for me.

Have in mind that there are also a lot of "developers" who "steal" other repositories, by not creating a fork, but copies of repositories, letting people believe that those are personal ones. Those candidates are a red flag for me.

So, if you use GitHub to get a job, this is visible to the experienced eye. But if you use it to help others, for me is a good thing.

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Elijah Allen

Stack overflow seems like an obvious place as well. Any reason why you left it out?

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Mangabo Kolawole

It has been a longtime since I have used it/commented on it. I answered some questions there and had some good discussions but I found myself having more success on the platforms I cited above.

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Melody Mbewe

Thank you for the insightful guide on building an online presence as a developer! I completely agree that finding an authentic voice, mixing honesty with a bit of “cringe” is essential for engagement. Your emphasis on consistency and giving back to the community resonates with me —building relationships takes time, but it pays off. I’m excited to apply your tips and see how they impact my journey!

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Marcos Issler

Cringe was totally new for me, but was 110% true! I like the way you see things. Really, in the world of digital media, if you want to play the game, those are the rules.

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Mangabo Kolawole

Exactly. Most of the time I will try to have a catchy first sentence and a picture and drop some useful stuff in the content. This is the game unfortunately and I noticed it has increased in this AI era

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TimoCodes • Edited

daily.dev is a wonderful place to build your developer network

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KENNEDY

Thanks for this post but do you have to be an expert developer before you can start posting content online.

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koladev profile image
Mangabo Kolawole

No, there is no need to be an expert. However, be honest about that and make sure you are learning, and experimenting and you can state it to avoid backlash.

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KENNEDY

Alright

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Chesed Wolfjager

What a great article to read. It is easy to grow on LinkedIn (I have more than 2000 connections there) but my account got restricted because I violated their policies. I could get it back, but for that, I would need my passport which I currently don't have. But the engagement I get there is not great, because I don't know everyone. But, the knowledge I got from there is valuable. Someone told me how to set up ChatGPT, a great tool! I use AI to generate ideas for website structures and other insights. With X, I face a similar problem. I know nobody and there are only fake accounts following me. By engaging with posts like these, I got one follower on my chesedgames.online/ account. It is true, that consistency is key. I have a former friend who is a content creator, and I can tell you it is not easy. I have tried to be a YouTuber for years, but I failed. So now I am focusing on written content.

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zonder profile image
zonder
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hassan_yousaf_6ce227e8830 profile image
Hassan Yousaf

What do you think about GitHub for development?

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boutchitos

Thanks for sharing!

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Boopathi

Thanks for sharing :)

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Kevin

it's my first time to reply a article with english, even not use translation software! thank you to make me got a lot of thinking ( sorry, i really not good at english)

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Murilo Gervasio

Good article, agreed with each one of your comments specially about LinkedIn.

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Soulis

I can confirm that it takes a lot of work and dedication.

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Mangabo Kolawole

Definitely 💯

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Aniket Bagal

Nice Article

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Charles Interface

Thank you very mucho for this