building YOUR brand as a developer...

⭐️ a strong personal brand is freedom ⭐️ Hey {NAME} 👋, Over the last several years, the internet has slowly chipped away at the idea of the personal blog. And it’s a real f’n shame. Where has it left us? With publishing platforms that strip us of our own personal brands in favor of scale. We’ve got Facebook. Now taken over by our parents and grandparents. Our children won’t even log in because the last thing they want to see is Granny blasting her “old timey” political values. Our “friends” from high school want us to buy their strongly scented, multi-level Essential Snake Oils, and if you think anybody actually watches your videos? hah FB is what it is, but it’s not the spot for deep thought. On the other side of that, we have Twitter. I love Twitter myself, but I also have to meticulously prune it like the social network equivalent of a bonsai tree. It’s not that shitposting doesn’t have its place in this world, but thank the admin for delivering to us mute, block, and the ability to disable retweets. Twitter gives us the rapid-fire dose of HERE’S WHAT IS IN MY HEAD NOW CONDENSED INTO 240 WORDS. It’s often overwhelming. And not really a place for nuance. For more nuanced breadth, we’ve seen the rise of the Medium post. Medium gives us a stylishly same-same, easy-to-use platform for clickbait titles and extended thought leader-ing. I’m totally not into it. Outside of LinkedIn, Medium is my least favorite place to write words. Writing words takes effort. I’m not going to put in the work, then hand off ownership to some venture-backed platform — only to get lost in the sea of other people furiously pounding at their keyboards to cash in on a few minutes’ worths of notoriety before tomorrow’s posts get published. Giving Medium words in exchange for exposure is hardly a fair trade. If I write something, I want it to be a “Joel” post, not a “Medium” post. Nobody ever says “oh, hey, did you see that article Joel wrote on Medium?” They say, “Did you see that Medium post?” This isn’t a callout. These platforms employee a lot of people that are doing very good work. The technology is freaking amazing across the board and super impressive by any reasonable analysis. But it’s also like fast food. It’s delicious. It’s easy. It’s there. But it isn’t good for you. These are your deeply-held opinions that took years for you to develop. You own those thoughts, so you should own where you air them. We — and I mean us, the software developers — need to make a stand and bring back the personal blog. We need to own our work, our thoughts, our tutorials, our content. And as developers, we’re uniquely positioned to do it. Instead of spending a night or a full weekend creating something valuable and useful to post in somebody else’s space, we should be using our work to our advantage to spotlight our skills, demonstrate our capabilities, and — perhaps most important — to help other people learn and grow as well. So they can do the same in return. This should be the golden era of developer blogs. We’ve got access to really freaking amazeballs tools that let us set up a beautiful, accessible, fast AF, easy-to-use personal blog in a literal afternoon. [Image] Ya, Dan isn’t overhyping it. Gatsby is one of the most amazing pieces of software to hit the internet in a long time. Ask me, it’s the spark that is going to reignite the developer blog (and beyond). (And it’s the exact opposite of the bloated hacker candy WordPress that we had at Peak Blog™.) Gatsby is powerful, flexible, and easy to work with (if you’ve got some other skills nailed down). It’s even easier to deploy when we have access to amazing services like Netlify and Zeit Now, which will deploy your new blog with SSL on a custom domain in 5-10 mins. The blog has always been an amazing “breakable toy” — a thing you can play with and hack on. You can tweak it, try out new layouts, and shave as many freaking yaks as you damn well please and nobody can say anything. Because it’s yours. Remember blogrolls? Here’s mine. I love Tania Rascia’s space: [( Just look at it! Tania’s blog is easy to follow because everything is crisp and where it should be. It’s so not clever, that it’s absolutely clever. You can literally see Tania’s entire journey as a chef-turned-programmer in a sequence of posts that are interesting and informative. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tania to have a conversation about learning in public and building a personal brand through knowledge sharing. [Listen to my interview with Tania here.]( Another favorite is Julia Evans’s space here: [( Julia says she writes her posts to her smart friends who she knows are reading them. Go back through the amazing backlog of posts she has accumulated over the years. It’s delightful and gives you an amazing picture of who Julia is as a technologist. Dan Abramov decided he was going to get back into writing purely for himself and to be helpful over at [( I’m really looking forward to reading more of his posts. Occasionally I blog here: []( but most of my current effort is spent "blogging" via email 👋 - which is another post entirely! Your voice is important. Everything that needs to be said hasn’t been written down yet. You don’t need to write masterpieces, just to share solutions to problems that you have. We will all appreciate it. When you get your blog back up and running, [send me the link on twitter](, and I’ll get you a RT 😂 -joel Stop staying informed and [unsubscribe]( if you don't want to get these emails. 337 Garden Oaks Blvd #97429 Houston, TX 77018 [View in browser](