If you've ever wanted to build your professional reputation as a SWE through consistent, high-volume, high-quality content, these are my proven recommendations to you for building technical authority and becoming a well-known SWE online.
I have been publishing an average of one article a week for more than 6 years without a break on this blog, covering a variety of technical topics in depth, primarily in my own SWE specialty area of front-end engineering with TypeScript and Next.js.
In total, I published at least half a million words — or roughly 5 full-length novels — during that time, on top of periods of full-time work and full-time consulting to my own freelance clients.
I've spent a long time analyzing my success and will share with you in this article the exact steps I would recommend you follow if you want to become a well-known SWE.
First and most importantly, let's start with why someone might want to become a well-known SWE and what the potential benefits and costs of doing so are.
Becoming a Well-Known SWE Hurt My SWE Career
There have been exactly two jobs I've had as an SWE where my blog was even a factor in employment; nobody else seemed to care in the least, and many employers thought my blog meant I must be a "writer" not an SWE.
I started blogging online 25 years ago in the LiveJournal era (think GeoCities and AngelFire). So I guess I've always been partial to it, especially because I was paid to do so as an international study abroad/foreign exchange student in college. In fact, I was actually paid to vlog.
I think it's kind of funny that I didn't go back to vlogging on YouTube, making long-form edited content. I guess I personally just don't like looking up programming technical details in YouTube videos; I still don't.
So back in 2019, I started writing technical articles online again. I figured this would assist my transition back to being a full-time SWE after a few years as a full-time PT and an Airbnb SuperHost on the side.
I used my blog to teach myself React and also to build some followers.
I mean, I know that's vain, but I thought there would be a relationship there between followers and having a successful career.
So I did that. I tried to cross-post on LinkedIn for a while. I hate LinkedIn. That didn't really seem to help at all, though it's kind of hard to tell.
Within 3 months of starting my technical blog, I had gotten a part-time job offer from somebody who had reached out to me on LinkedIn and had apparently read my blog, though thinking back, I'm not entirely sure if they'd seen my posts on LinkedIn or had actually seen them on my blog.
Anyway, the job was part-time and didn't pay great, so I figured the jobs would be rolling in after that point. And they didn't.
I think overall that writing 50+ technical articles was just something that confused tech recruiters and hiring managers more than anything else.
What ended up getting me successful, full-time positions was just practicing the skill of demonstrating world-class technical skills in my coding portfolio and take-home assignments, as well as branding myself throughout my resume and the entire hiring process as a specialist with those same skills.
In other words, I stopped being an unemployable SWE.
As soon as I started delivering flawless work in my portfolio and take-home assignments that was exactly coherent and consistent with how I was pitching myself in my resume, my elevator pitch, and my other career documents and communication, that's when people were really starting to fall over themselves to hire me.
My point is, there was almost no relationship between being well-known as an SWE and getting full-time work.
If you want to become well-known as an SWE, I would say do it for whatever reason makes the most sense to you, but that isn't getting a full-time job. For example:
- Vanity metrics like follower count
- Financial goals and intellectual property
- To become a technical writer or developer advocate
The last is probably the most interesting money-making goal, because developer advocates or developer relations engineers (the part of SWE often abbreviated DevRel) are good-paying tech jobs that are technical, but they're great for people who enjoy writing about and making video content about technical subjects.
So I would say that is by far the best reason to become a well-known SWE: if you want people to pay you for the same exact steps it's going to take you to become one: creating a bunch of content for the internet.
Some people love follower counts.
Especially if you want to do DevRel in big tech, you're going to need big follower counts, and you're going to need to present live in front of 1,000, but especially crowds of 10,000 and more. (That's something that I heard directly from a Meta recruiter once upon a time.)
People always think there is money in blogging, but there kind of never was. There is money to be made on certain platforms, but writing words online was never especially one of them.
But let's get into that next, and then I'll give you exactly how to achieve the goal of becoming a well-known SWE.
Where To Become a Well-Known SWE Online
Your choice of platform is going to depend entirely on your goals. (You can choose multiple platforms at the same time if you don't mind the work.)
I really mind the extra work, so I just focus on my blog as my only "social media" platform. I have tried LinkedIn multiple times, even with semi-automated tools like Buffer, and I just have no interest in it.
My best tip for LinkedIn is to connect with as many people and have as many conversations as you can, and try to hit that 100–200 connections a week limit. That's 5,000 followers a year.
So once you're doing that consistently, you'll get a lot more traction on LinkedIn, but you will need those first 2-plus years to get 10,000-plus followers for it to start to snowball as a platform.
You're also not going to make any money on LinkedIn, but obviously it's a good platform if you want to be well-known to get hired for a DevRel job or just for the vanity of the thing.
If you're looking to make money, then Substack is the obvious choice, but you do really need to be bringing in an audience from somewhere or figure out how Substack will network you through their own platform discovery feature, which apparently works pretty well. You'll also have to balance free and paid content.
I would point to Noahpinion on Substack as an example. Even though he's not a technical writer, his method for monetizing technical expertise in geopolitics is similar to what a SWE would need to do with free and paid content to effectively make money writing on Substack.
Twitter, theoretically, would be like LinkedIn, but I've never been a user there. So, Twitter is going to be basically the same as LinkedIn, but with a little bit more opinion: good for vanity follower metrics and visibility for social proof for getting hired for DevRel.
Your own personal website or blog on a private domain can be hard to get traction (reads). So many people use other blogging platforms, not just Substack, for that reason. But you'll have the most ownership over your list of email subscribers if you capture them through your own domain.
And SWEs, of course, often prefer developing our own websites and blogs. So that's an option, though usually it's the least effective for any of the three goals I mentioned before, simply because of the lower visibility. The exception is going to be if you write extremely controversial topics, which I think is kind of the same for Substack.
Anytime you start your own blog, YouTube channel, TikTok, or whatever, building the audience is always really challenging. So that's what I'm going to walk you through next: how to combine quality, consistency, and controversy to become a well-known SWE.
This is exactly the system I've been following myself that I built and have been using for 6 years now.
My Proven System for Becoming a Well-Known SWE
Fundamentally, when I'm talking about becoming "well-known" as an SWE, I am referring to getting followers and reads or views on a social media platform, specifically on text (blog) content, or videos (YouTube, I think, is a much better platform for SWEs than TikTok).
The most important thing is to deliver quality, and that means authenticity. So it doesn't mean perfect prose or even the most research, but having dense, fact-checked information with your authentic opinion based on your real-life and real-world experience as an SWE.
That's going to be the most important thing. That quality or authenticity will allow people to connect with you.
Lately, I found that the easiest way to do that is through dictation. I use OpenAI Whisper for free on my local computer after recording articles speaking into my phone. That makes it super easy to be authentic and, more importantly, deliver a production velocity that is as good as what some idiot spammer using generative AI to write a bunch of crap text is going to produce.
When I'm dictating, I time myself repeatedly and found that I consistently hit 5,000 words per hour of recorded dictation. So I highly recommend it.
It's also going to cover the second most important thing for becoming a well-known SWE: consistency.
The ideal publication frequency on basically any social media platform is once a day. You can still get a ton of traction publishing once a week without fail. By the time you're down to publishing once a month without fail, you're paddling upstream, though it can work with extremely high-quality content on certain platforms like YouTube that reward virality a lot.
The way to achieve consistency is to aim for a streak, but not a "past streak" of how many you've done at your target frequency.
I don't think of my streak as being, "once a week for the past 3 weeks, my streak is 3, and it will be 4 if I publish this week."
I think of my streak as what I have pre-scheduled that's going to automatically publish moving forward.
Because that turns the streak from this chain — you know, "don't break the chain," according to Jerry Seinfeld — that weighs you down. And really, at least when I lost my Duolingo streak, I felt really upset about it.
So I don't like streaks like that.
For me, the streak is the forward streak, the future streak, the momentum I've already banked up in my buffer of pre-scheduled content. That is the tip for consistency: redefine the word "streak" to mean from today, how many do you have scheduled at the consistency you want to hit?
The reason I recommend thinking about consistency this way is so that it takes the pressure off because you're not trying to do a "just in time" manufacturing process. No, you need to get in there, you need to batch record 4 articles in 3 or 4 hours with your voice recorder. You need to do that once every week or 2, when you can find the time.
That way, you'll be building up this streak of articles. You'll first have 3 scheduled ahead, then 6 scheduled ahead. You start to realize you could take 3 weeks off and your blog is fine, and you would still come back to 3 more weeks on the streak.
That is how you become a consistent SWE without burning yourself out in the process.
And the third, and probably least fun for me personally, is controversy. Viral content is almost always controversial, or sometimes emotional, but typically controversial.
So dry, technical articles will break your heart as a technical author, and they won't make you a well-known SWE. Trust me, as lame as it sounds, I've cried about really good JavaScript articles I wrote that got no traction.
This is especially true because writing my technical blog has never been any good for my SWE career, because I never really wanted to do DevRel; I wanted to lead product-led growth marketing as a C-suite executive, and DevRel is not that.
Anyway, the good news is that you don't have to give controversial opinions that you don't agree with.
For example, one of my most-read articles of all time is about why I prefer merge commits over squash commits, which basically just boils down to I love making frequent, atomic, semantic commits, so I wanted to complete history. It's not an article that I think is going to hurt anybody's feelings, but because there is controversy there, it's very, very popular. Like, hundreds of times more popular than my dry JavaScript articles.
So you can't skip controversy. You have to deliver your authentic opinion on controversial topics. In fact, if you go all the way in and you are extremely controversial, that will help you become a well-known SWE, although you might develop a negative reputation. So there's that.
Wrapping Up: How To Become a Well-Known SWE
I've been through it. I've shed the tears. I've failed as a technical author over and over again.
That's happened anytime I've lowered my quality standards for any reason, missed my consistency goal of even once a month (with once a day really being preferable for internet content), or written FAQ-style articles instead of authentic, controversial opinions.
I think pretty much anyone can become a well-known SWE if you do all of those 3 things.
But again, being famous may make you some money, especially if you come up with a way of monetizing your own IP, like a paid newsletter on Substack (again, see Noahpinion for a good example of somebody who turned a Twitter following into money as a writer), etc.
But for the most part, and especially if you want to, like me, reinforce the depth of your understanding of technical subjects by writing really dry, thorough, but well-researched content, then you're just going to be disappointed.
While there will be a very small number of people who really appreciate that type of content, overwhelmingly, people won't read it or view it.
Whatever you choose, if you want to be successful, you need to produce quality, consistent, and controversial content.
I think the best takeaway I can leave you with is, don't get your hopes up about getting super rich by becoming well-known, at least for the first 5 years of trying to do it. That's what they say, right?
Also, just share your authentic, conversational, fact-checked opinion frequently. That will make you a well-known SWE.
You can pick any one or multiple platforms if you feel like it, but don't burn out. I would suggest: pick one platform, use my streak idea to bank up a buffer of future content, use a good mic and free AI voice transcription (like how I dictated this article) for quality and authenticity.
And then, that just leaves controversy.
Give your opinion about things that other people have opinions about, that you have some expertise in or that at least you can research.
Make your opinion clear.
Just having a clear opinion is controversial because so many people don't, and also it's what people want to read. People want to read other opinions and see if they agree or disagree with you.
When you do all of those things together, success will eventually follow.
And definitely, if you want to do DevRel, all you have to mix on top would be presenting at as many conferences as you can in person, especially big ones. That's the secret for a DevRel engineer career.
Anyway, happy becoming famous and coding! ⭐🤩🧑🎤
