As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I had been wanting to start a technical blog for some time. Mainly a a way of capturing things I learn or discover so that it can benefit others. As an engineer I consume a lot of content on the web. Let’s face it, when we hit some technical hurdle or are trying to figure something out that we haven’t seen before, our job become that of an internet sleuth, combing the web for answers on StackOverflow, blogs, etc.

By nature I’m not much of a self promoter and in some ways, I’ve tended to view blogs and “personal brands” as shameless self-promotion (nothing personal John Sonmez or other bloggers). One day I listened to John on the Software Engineering Radio Podcast where his topic was that of soft skills. I’m old enough to realize that the smartest engineers are not necessarily the most successful. Being a good engineer is really important…but it’s good to have some personal skills rather than being the Doritos-eating-mt-dew-drinking person who lives in a hovel and cranks out code. The soft skills are the ones which can really propel your career and work forward taking it from great or good to amazing. Soft skills were the topic of discussion in this podcast interview with John and it really resonated with me…with that I got over my unfair view of being a self-promoter and whipped this up.

I’ve jumped in head first and signed up for John’s 7-part course on boosting your career. Now, I can’t say one way or another how or if this will help your career trajectory, but it’s really helped to motivate me to get this blog up and running and to attempt to be a bit more visible in the “public” eye. I highly recommend it:

http://devcareerboost.com/blog-course/

As a real example, I authored and open sourced the servant library over a year ago. We’ve been running in production at work for over a year…but it hasn’t been publicized outside of my small team. Just blogging about it and creating some links could help somewhere out there who’s interested in authoring a microservice with Python. And, even if that doesn’t happen, it’s been fun to talk about what I work on and show something that I’m proud of, even if the audience is small.

John’s email campaign is pretty light and gives you some practical assignments to get your blog up and running. I can definitely say that I wouldn’t be writing this now had I not enrolled…so with that, I tip my hat to John and say thank you!