Things That Do Not Matter
Explore how to market yourself as a software engineer without relying on fleeting popularity or social media fame. Understand the value of focusing on long-term personal branding, genuine peer relationships, and consistent professional growth over short-term analytics or broad appeal. This lesson guides you in building a sustainable career path by investing in authentic connections and skills rather than chasing attention.
We'll cover the following...
Appealing to everybody
It does not matter if you don’t seem appealing to everyone.
Short-term optimizations
- Day of the week and time of day that you post
- Short term analytics (e.g., weekly traffic)
- It’s not really that they don’t matter; it’s just that you should be working on more evergreen things that make short-term nonsense irrelevant.
Being a celebrity
- It’s better to be rich and unknown than poor and famous. If you can build a successful tech career without being a celebrity, then absolutely do that — unless you just crave the attention.
- I haven’t mentioned followers once in this entire section. You can buy followers, and everyone can tell. It looks sad.
- Building real relationships with peers and mentors you respect is way more fulfilling than raw numerical mass appeal.
Recap
That was a LOT of high-level marketing concepts. Do take a while to digest them. The last section is going to be a grab bag of tactical ideas for marketing yourself - after you get the important details in place.
To recap:
Assemble your personal brand domain, and coding skills/business value, then Market Yourself in Public + at Work.
As Troy Hunt often notes in his career advice, good personal marketing is your Plan B. If you only start doing it when you need it, it will be too late. Take the time to work on it while the stakes are low, and you’ll be much better at it when the stakes are high.