A Problem with Developers !

Developers are intelligent people who love to write code in isolation. Being a developer, I also love to work in a separate room fighting with bugs but there's a problem.

Yes. The problem with developers like me and most of others as well.

Problem is that me and you and others - all are equally good developers. All solve complex problems daily, shipping new products, integrating new features and fighting with bugs. We all nearly have same set of responsibility.

Did you get it? Right?

We are good but we aren't showing that we are good enough as others. This is where most developers lag behind. Due to that in my opinion, developers are killing their careers. They miss a lot of opportunities due to lack of networking habits, good communication skills and other related things.

The Cure

Since, we just identified the problem. Let us find the cure.

So, to address this problem a developer should network, network and network.

When you network you are exposing yourself to a vast world of opportunities. You get a lot of traction. You make yourself a personal brand. And many more benefits come out of this.

How to network ?

Ahhh. I don't know anyone in my community. Know one knows me. Why on earth someone will talk to me?

These all are the thoughts which start popping up in our minds when we think of networking.

Believe me. It's hard to fight these thoughts but just start. Search nearby meetups in your locality. Pick one which interests you or is relevant to your work or tech stack you work on and just show up there.

If you are a good speaker, go and speak to people there. Once you show your presence people will start noticing you and will definitely talk to you. It will take time but soon you will be heard.

My Story :

So, my story is same. I used to be a lonely developer sometimes ago. I thought working in open source was just a waste of time. Networking was not my thing. and Speaking is related to some academician not a programmer like me.

Life passed on!

It was August, 2019. I was given an assignment in my workplace to make some sort research on storing data as we were starting a project. I tried to search about the topic. But I found that people were talking about EDA, complex models, Naive Byes, SVMs, ANNs and everything but there wasn't a guide on how to store data (I wasn't able to get information from a single source). I researched a bit on the topic. Some thoughts came in my own mind. I collected all these things and wrote on Medium to remember the points.

Few days later when I revisited the draft, I thought why not publish it so that everyone can benefit from this?

I published it. You can read it here :

How to store Data for your Data Science Process - Saeed Ahmad - Medium

Saeed Ahmad Nov 18, 2019 7 min read

Medium

I thought it will get a lot of views since topic was unique. But it didn't. I waited but still it didn't.

DEV comes to save me !

I was disheartened. As you know, it's all about views and claps (on Medium), which matters to a writer. I didn't get them at all.

Days of life kept on passing.

One day, I was searching about some topic. I stumbled upon the DEV!
Loved the UI. It was simple and elegant. After I read the tutorial, I signed up. Curious to know about this, I came to know that DEV is a 'free' Medium. You can read as many articles as you can here without any paywall.

I thought to give it a try. So, copy pasted my whole Medium article here. Although, it was Data Science related but still audience on DEV was responsive and loving. There were more views as compared to Medium. I got around 10 reactions in 2 days.

That was big for me at that time and enough to boost my morale.

I started writing on DEV. Response here was quick. People were loving my posts.

In those days, Jack Ma and Elon Musk had a debate about future of AI. I planned to write an article on it. You can read it here :

Jack Ma vs Elon Musk Debate Different perspectives of future of AI

Saeed Ahmad Sep 6 '19 1 min read

#machinelearning #artificialintelligence #future #datascience

It was my first article which got 1K+ views on DEV. I was so happy that I was getting traction.

That gave me a boost. Since then I have been writing every week and discussing things which developers in particular and community in general loves.

On one of my post, Quincy Larson commented to thank me for promoting freeCodeCamp tutorials.

What Next ?

So, so far so good.

Till now, I have written a lot of posts and articles. One of them has got around 100K+ views. Collectively, my articles have got 218K+ views. I have around 12K+ followers here.

I have interacted with a lot of people here. Learn't a lot from them. They have become friends for me. Many have reached out to me for help. They have been asking about refactoring CV, general career advice and other things. I have felt extremely good to help them and they have also taught me many things.

Thank you so much to all of you.

Thank you so much DEV.

Thank you so much The DEV Community.

You have been helpful to me and amazing...