Ask HN: What is the best way to promote your abilities as a developer?
I am a web developer and I have been working in this area for 4 years. But I have not really built something that could really show my abilities. And I have been wondering if I should be a good stackoverflow member, write articles, work in open sources projects, put my side projects online ?
I am not looking for a job right now, but I want to have something valuable that could help me find a great one if I need to.
4 comments
http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup
A big salary can evaporate quickly. Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession.
A big salary can evaporate quickly. Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession.
Isn't the number of IT jobs having a net increase?
Have a GitHub account and share code you've written.
I would definitely recommend blogging about technical issues and creating open source tools.