From blogging and social to podcasting to public speaking, here are some things software developers can do to gain a wider audience and get their stuff noticed.
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This last week, I had three people complaining to me (in individual interactions) that they create cool things, but what they create is not noticed because they don’t have a following on Twitter or otherwise. In at least one of the cases there was a fair amount of bitterness. An attitude of: «If you create something, it becomes popular by virtue of you being so popular. If I create something, it goes unnoticed, even if it’s better than what you created.»
While this may be true, the attitude bothers me. I’d be classified in the «popular» crowd, so maybe that’s why it bothers me, but it also bothers me because it feels like «pride from the bottom looking up» or could also come from a fixed mindset. I wasn’t born with a Twitter following (though I was born into privilege which makes a non-trivial impact, and I’ll address that later). I worked for this by creating things and doing things to get noticed even before I had the following. This is true of most people with a wide reach. In today’s newsletter, I’d like to share with you some things that I’ve seen be an effective way to get your work noticed and widen your reach.
There’s not one thing I’ve done to get noticed and widen my reach. And there’s also not a sequence. It’s been a mix of several things (including hard work, luck, timing, and kindness of others) that have helped me to do this. Depending on what you’re trying to get noticed for, there are different things you can do, so I’ll focus on a few, and hopefully that’ll touch on what you’re doing…
My first personal open source project that I wanted to get noticed was geniejs. The first commit was back in 2013. I can’t remember exactly how many followers I had, but at the time I was tweeting using Friends+ me (because I thought Google+ was the bomb) and of all my tweets that month, only one got a single favorite. Needless to say, I wasn’t well known or popular.
And honestly, my project didn’t get super popular at the time, either. However, that didn’t stop me from working on getting it noticed. I presented it at my work’s hack night around that time (it’s actually how I got my first fulltime job at Domo); I built a sweet in-browser workshop and used it in my first meetup talk; I then lucked out and got a conference (MidwestJS 2014) to accept me to give that talk there (I only was able to speak because another speaker canceled).
Here are some takeaways from this experience: It never got very popular or widely used (it’s still not, despite my level of reach, though it is used by codesandbox!). Despite this it gave me opportunities to improve my skills, show my skills, get a job, and speak at a meetup and conference. This was primarily a combination of luck, timing, assistance (my friend Merrick Christensen should be thanked for helping me turn this into a job opportunity), courage (to propose my library as the subject for a talk at a meetup and conference), and hard work/persistence (I documented the library very well and built a great learning experience).
About a year after I started work on geniejs (when I still did not have much by way of a twitter following, etc.), I was moonlighting at a small startup that had a pretty basic CRUD app with a ton of forms. I looked around at the AngularJS form libraries, found one I really liked, and before long I made my first pull request to angular-formly. At the time, it wasn’t a terribly popular project itself, but I needed it and it satisfied most of my use cases.
In the weeks that followed, I made more and more pull requests and before too long, the project maintainer (who was no longer using the project) asked me if I wanted to take the project over as the maintainer. I accepted and began the work of improving the project and building a community.
Honestly, at the time I wasn’t really thinking that’s what I was doing. A lot of my concern was the excitement of hearing that people were using something that I built and a desire for my library to be the best in its class. Definitely not the most pure motivations, but my results were positive and within a few months, downloads quadrupled and to my knowledge, angular-formly is still the number one most downloaded AngularJS forms library.
So what did I do to build such popularity of the project so quickly? Well, one thing I did (which I don’t recommend) was I sorta sold my soul to the project. I allowed myself to get carried away in answering issues as if they were paid support requests. I prided myself on responding to issues in seconds and having a fix pushed out in minutes. This was a lot of fun, but it did put strain on my important relationships and my mental health, which is why I don’t recommend it.
I’ve found that you can build a strong and positive community without sacrificing your well-being and relationships. That’s a subject for another blog post. Just know that working on building a community by creating fantastic documentation (including several free egghead.io lessons), encouraging contribution, and recognizing and trusting contributors is an important part of getting adoption and recognition for your open source work.
Other things that I did which were significant help were similar to what I did with geniejs: I spoke at meetups and conferences (my talk at MidwestJS 2015 was about angular-formly, and I gave the same talk at the first ng-nl conference). I worked on making the documentation and learning materials fantastic. I ensured the project satisfied the use cases it needed to while attempting to avoid overcomplexity (so it was something people would want to use). I also reached out to relevant newsletters to invite them to check it out and reference it in their newsletter. Oh, and I tweeted about it a lot.
It took a lot of work, but my work was recognized and appreciated and the success there was a major talking point in my interview with my future boss’s boss at PayPal which probably helped me get hired.
Something I did NOT do is spam dozens of «influencers» out of the blue on Twitter asking them to use and promote a library which for them was probably irrelevant because they probably didn’t need or have a use case for anyway. I have dozens of people per week asking me to review the things they’ve built or written. This really only bothers me when it’s clear that I’m one of tens of others to whom they’ve sent the same message, but it’s also ineffective because often these «influencers» either don’t have the time to review them or the project may not have any relevance to them.
I also did not attempt to throw shade at alternatives or downplay the value of their abstractions. Being unkind to the hard work of other people is a very poor way to promote your project and has no good place in the world.
Me teaching people at a workshop
I recently published a blog post called Why and How I Started Public Speaking. I’m just going to link you to that story rather than re-iterate the whole thing here. But I do want to tell how I got started with creating content for egghead.io as that made a big influence on widening my reach.
Back in June 2014, I spoke at AngularJS Utah meetup about something I had been learning about in a school project ( you can watch the talk here!). Not long later, John Lindquist (co-founder and original instructor on egghead.io) watched the recording and emailed me inviting me to turn the workshop into a course.
This lead into an incredible positive relationship. Being an instructor on a platform like egghead.io gives you automatic authority in the minds of many people. It did take some time and consistency with creating content on egghead.io, but after some time, the following started to grow (as did my royalties which have been sufficient enough to pay my monthly home mortgage here in Utah for a couple years now).
Here’s the takeaway: If my talk had not been recorded, John would not have seen the value I created that night at the meetup and I could have missed or delayed my egghead.io opportunity. You are constantly creating value. A conversation with a co-worker, a meetup talk, a realization after hours of working on a hard to solve bug. The trick is to take those value creating experiences and make them public. This is where my DevTips with Kent and my Tech Chats come from. Both of those activities widen my reach.
Just over a year after I started with egghead.io (in September 2015), after I had established myself a bit with Egghead, I was listening to episode 178 of JavaScript Jabber: Tech Education and The Business of Running Front End Masters with Marc Grabanski. I had met Marc at my first MidwestJS where we were both speakers and thought he was a pretty cool dude. I knew of Frontend Masters and had a great deal of respect for Marc and his company. So I reached out to him:
To which Marc responded:
And so began my relationship with Frontend Masters. I now have six courses (almost 7) on Frontend Masters. The takeaway here is courage. I’m mostly sharing my success stories in this blog post, but you gotta know that there were plenty of rejections as well.
