Leveling Up Your Career

There are times in your life and career when you know you’ve reached a new high, like when you were a kid and you finally got to that next level in Mario. One such high was a few months after I started my blog when I got my first LinkedIn message from a Google recruiter. Not that I’m looking to switch jobs, but it was nice that my LinkedIn profile looked good enough for the recruiter to spend a few cents to spam me.

But last week I feel like I leveled up in a new way. My team was investigating an obscure error with one of our cloud servers and after a little googling, they found a stack overflow page with a long thread of different potential solutions. None of them quite matched our specific issue until the post right at the bottom of the page. This post had the exact solution to our issue, which the team then implemented to solve the problem. The author? Brenton Race, January 2, 2019 (aka, me!).

Troy Hunt (now a minor internet celebrity in the software security space) started his blog back in 2009 with this great article about why you should establish an online identity. I really think this still holds true today as one of the best things you can do for your career, and clearly it worked out for Troy. And I can vouch that building an online profile on stack overflow, github or your blog isn’t just a good career move, it’s also a great way to document solutions to problems you’ve solved so your team, your future self and others on the internet can benefit.