Want something? Give something!
Sometimes opportunity is falsely disguised as opportunism
Part of a series of daily writings I’m doing alongside the inktober event. Enjoy some of my thoughts on different topics. Today’s original composition is
Enjoy!
Recently, I caught myself wondering how can I improve the visibility on the projects I’m involved. How can I showcase myself as a better professional. I figured that while it is important that we connect with others through our creations, it’s difficult to find an audience when we are still learning. It’s pretty much true that we can spam people with our creations on their timelines, but there is something more valuable we can do to connect: educate them.
My work involves programming different types of things. It’s pretty common to see public open projects maintained by one person or a small community. We hear all the time that we should contribute to one of these projects in order to grow as a professional. I myself have created and abandoned several public projects, but never actually contributed to any of the already existing ones. I don’t contribute most of the time because I don’t think I’m knowledgeable enough to add good code to them. This happens to many developers, but only a few figured out that although they can’t contribute with code to a specific project, they can still help spread the word, and I’m not talking about shout outs or spamming on Twitter how good the project is.
Just ask yourself “Is this project easy to get started?”, “Could it be better documented?”, “How many local developers of my area know about this project?”, “Can we find resources or cool products that use that specific project?”. These are just some of the many questions that probably have answers on Stack Overflow on a micro level, but what about the bigger picture? There’s always opportunity to show how to overcome the problems you’re facing. And when you start to improve, people are gonna regard you as a trustworthy professional. Just think about it. Would you rather hire a professional that people are always talking about, or a guy that you still need to interview in order to know what he has done?
In short, build a reputation that precedes you.
People need to know what you’re doing before you even open your mouth to talk about it. And the only way to do that is to show what you know and be available during the learning process. You’ll learn much faster if you start sharing interesting and relevant things about your field of work. Go around the online communities and spread the word. Look for gaps and things that are not being talked about that you think are important. Maybe the wording on some article is not interesting, or maybe you think something could be showcased in a different, more appealing way, perhaps things have changed and there is a better way to work things out.
Just think about any professional that is relevant to your area. Chances are you’ve probably read or watched something about them. This is not to say that teaching others is what will make you relevant in a certain professional field. But when you talk about something, others will know where you’re standing on and where you belong. It certainly is a great starting point in order to transition from being a referencer to become the reference.
We see this all the time on YouTube and the invasion of video essays on several topics. They suddenly became one of the fast growing types of channel. Knowledge is competing with sheer entertainment. That means people want to know more, and there’s always room for everyone.
It’s gonna be hard work. You’ll think you’re not gonna do a good job, or that you shouldn’t be doing this for free. But as an apprentice, you should definitely feel the passion for what you’re doing and feel motivated to talk about the things you discover. Start the discussion! The masters don’t need to do this all the time, but when they do, you have everybody going crazy over Hans Zimmer’s masterclass. Why do we want to listen to what Hans has to say? Because his music has already talked for him.
Don’t ever miss a chance to put that learning into practice. Share with the world what you’re doing. Have everyone telling others that you have the solution to that specific problem. That your article helped them save time. Hans Zimmer could invite you to his studio, share all his techniques, give you all his gear, but in the end, Nolan is still going to work with him on his next film.
Learn, share your discoveries, improve your craft. Everyone will be thankful and you’ll get the best part of the deal.
Thanks for reading! It’s a bit of a nonsense to me to have a project that talks about the project itself, but this text is late because of the attempt at maintaining my routine while doing three new things at the same time. (see previous writing.) I’m slowly figuring out that we have to actually keep a high energy level with low distraction in order to pull these new habits out of the idea plans. Since I don’t want to be behind my schedule, I’ll probably post a new piece of text very soon.
If you enjoyed this, consider clapping or commenting. Your words and thoughts are very important to me.
