How to Get Yourself Recognized Online

Developers thrive on the feedback of the community, and as a budding web developer or programmer you may find yourself thinking, “How can I get myself recognized?”. So how does one get recognized in the web development or programming field? Here are a few ways to do just that.

• Open source your work. This may be difficult for you if you’ve never done it before. You may feel like it’s your code and you don’t want anyone to have it. I thought that way at one time too. But once you let others see what you can do, not only will you be contributing to the community, you’ll also get extremely useful feedback from the community that you can use to improve your code.
• Develop some extensions/plugins. A huge way to bolster your reputation is to write some extensions or plugins for existing software. Two prime examples of software to develop extensions/plugins for is WordPress (blogging software) and PunBB (forum software). It’ll be harder to get recognized in a huge community like WordPress, but once you do, you’ll have a ton of people following your work. In a smaller community like PunBB, there is a lot less competition. It is a lot easier to find things that haven’t been written yet in a smaller community. As such, developing extensions/plugins for a smaller community can net some great rewards — especially if that community grows larger.
• Write some articles. There are plenty of sites that will allow you to write/submit articles (this one included). If you’ve got the knowledge, why not share it with others? Writing informative articles is a pretty big display of your knowledge and people will come flocking to you once they see how much you know.
• Join a community and help people. There are always people who need help. Find a community and become known for your contributions. Once people see you’ve helped others, you’ll become the guy they depend on.
• Build a website. This is pretty obvious but I’ve added it anyway. Building your own site will give you the ability to do all of the things I’ve stated above in one place. The site can be the central hub for your works, it’ll showcase your skills and allow people to easily get in touch with you. You can even build up your own community in which you all share a common goal.

Know any other ways to improve your visibility online and get recognition? Leave a comment!