Create & Connect

A Simple, Daily System to Launch and Grow a Successful Dev Career

I've recently become obsessed with the compounding effects of small, consistent, daily actions.

Nowhere is the benefit of this more apparent than in building a personal brand and growing a successful career.

The world is changing rapidly, traditional credentials no longer carry the weight they once did. The ubiquity of low-cost online sources of information means that a knowledge gap is no longer the main differentiating factor between candidates.

Anyone can go online, learn extremely valuable tech skills and use those to get a job. Thanks to places like FreeCodeCamp and Hashnode, you don't even need to pay anything in order for this to happen.

Take a second and really think about how incredible this is.

We humans tend to take things we currently have for granted, no matter how incredible they may have seemed even in the recent past.

The massive amount of information available to anyone with an internet connection has created an amazing amount of opportunity for people seeking to launch and grow a career on their own terms.

But it has also created two major problems in its wake. As is usually the case, our minds have not caught up with technological advances.

We are still used to having a clear-cut path to follow and wanting that clear-cut path.

The vast amount of tutorials, courses, and bootcamps has decentralized the learning content, but the tradeoff is that it is now up to us to forge our own path, because it won't be laid out for us.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good thing, but it is challenging.

The two problems both stem from this central concept, they are:

1. Figuring out exactly what you should learn and how
2. Getting noticed by the people that can move your career forward

This blog post seeks to provide a simple system that addresses both of these problems. I say simple, but simple does not always mean easy.

I named this system Create & Connect. It involves two very simple daily actions:

1. Creating and shipping something every day
2. Reaching out to one new person every day

That's it. These two simple actions when compounded daily have life-changing implications when done consistently over time.

My goal with this article is to give you a gameplan for launching and building a successful career as a developer from scratch, regardless of how busy you are.

It's broken up into three main parts:

• Why This Works
• How to Do It
• A Step-by-Step Plan to Get Started Today

Let's do this.

Why This Works

There are multiple reasons why this system works, on both an external and internal level.

What I mean by that is that this system will not only help you establish a personal brand and a presence online while growing your network, but it will also help you to build the kind of discipline and persistence it takes to be able to be the person that ships things.

The internal, mental changes you will get from this system are as beneficial, if not more so than the external personal branding and network benefits you'll get.

Consistently creating and shipping things every single day not only build discipline and habits but also will unleash this flood of creativity and help you start doing your best work.

Creativity is not a gift, it's not a fleeting mood. It's a choice, a habit. The more you create, the more creative you will become.

Creating every day will build your creativity muscle allowing you to make better stuff and get better at your craft, while simultaneously building your online presence in the process.

I've mentioned the concepts of an online presence and a network a few times now. I'll get into this in more detail in a future post, but the basic idea is that building a body of real work and getting that work in front of the right eyes is the best way to build a career you love.

The Create & Connect system allows you to do both.

This has the added benefit of eliminating decision fatigue and information overload. Your only goal is to complete the system each and every day.

The long-term goal of building a successful career will take care of itself if you show up every day and get these two things done.

By forcing yourself to create and ship something every day, you'll build a strong body of work and the discipline necessary to build valuable things even when you don't feel like it.

By reaching out to the right people every day, you'll build a network of people that can help bring you opportunities and propel your career forward.

Let's get into the practicalities of how to actually get this done.

How to Do It

Now we know why it's a good idea to do this stuff every day. Hopefully, you're convinced. If so, let's get into how to actually go about doing these things.

Please don't overcomplicate this. Just start and take action, today. Don't get hung up on questioning everything and making everything perfect. There lies madness.

Create

What exactly do we mean when we say "create"? All I really mean by this is creating something that did not exist before and making it publicly accessible.

For developers, this is mainly going to mean content and code.

So your goal for the "create" part of the system is to build and ship either a piece of a project or a piece of content every day.

For the code part, you'll need a GitHub account if you don't have one. In order for it to count, you need to be deploying something substantial to a GitHub repo. This could be a new feature, a bug fix, or even clarifying something in a README.

The other form of creating is publishing content.

The lowest barrier-to-entry method of doing this, by far, is creating a blog on  Hashnode . This is actually my first post on Hashnode, and I'm kicking myself for not getting set up on this platform sooner.

It allows you to get your own blog up and running in minutes, and you can even hook it up to a custom domain, all for free.

If in doubt, start here.

However, you can also start a YouTube channel or a podcast if those formats are more your thing. I can't provide any insight there since I've done neither.

So every day you should either be shipping code or content, ideally both if you have the time.

Your next question is likely to be what exactly you should be making or writing about. Unfortunately, there's no easy answer here.

This is where most people get tripped up and fail. They either never start because they get overwhelmed with making a decision, or they give up after a few days.

Don't let that be you.

Remember, one of the main benefits of this daily habit is that it will steadily grow your creativity and your ability to ship over time. It will not be perfect or even necessarily very good in the beginning.

That's okay. The goal is to show up and ship every day.

I don't want to leave you hanging, so I'll provide a sample plan and idea for your first post in the step-by-step plan section below.

Connect

So you're creating something every day, now let's talk about getting in touch and connecting with someone new every day.

This one was a game-changer for me. Like a lot of developers, I'm an introvert, and the idea of networking makes me want to vomit. That's why we're not doing anything like that here.

All we are doing is reaching out to people we genuinely admire, telling them why we do and introducing ourselves. That's it.

This simple method is how I got my first job as a developer with no experience. I had a body of work because I had been creating every day, and I started reaching out to people whose work I admired introducing myself.

Again, don't overcomplicate this.

This involves an ongoing process and a daily routine.

The ongoing process is gathering a list of people as you go through your day that you admire. As you read content and come across interesting projects, keep a file of people and companies you would like to work for.

You can do this in a simple spreadsheet with the following columns:

• Name
• Company
• Reason you admire them
• Contact Date
• Answered Date

Keep it simple.

Every time you come across someone whose work you admire and who you think you might like to work for, add them to this list.

Then, every day, choose one person from the list, find their email, and send them a simple, short email telling them what you specifically admire about their work and introducing yourself, what you are working on, and what your goals are.

Don't be sleazy about this. I see a lot of advice out there to just initiate a conversation or provide a compliment and then follow up later with what you really want.

I don't like that approach.

Be direct. Networking is only sleazy because people try to pretend it's something it's not.

In this email you want to accomplish a few things:

• Make sure the person knows this email was written specifically for them
• Provide a genuine reason why you are interested in them
• Tell them about what your goals are and why that relates to your interest in them

Let's look at an example. Let's say I'm just beginning my development journey and have been really interested in building UIs in React. I've created quite a few things and have written a few blog posts on Hashnode about it.

I come across a company that says they use React in their front end. I really like what the company does and I think it would be cool to work for them, so I decide to find the contact information of the founder, Chris, and reach out.

Note that it doesn't always have to be, and in some cases shouldn't be, the founder. If the company is larger, you may be better off reaching out to another developer or manager rather than a founder or C-level exec. Use your judgment here.

I use  Hunter  to find his email address and write the following:

*Hi Chris,

My name is Kenny. You don't know me but I'm a React developer and wanted to reach out to let you know how awesome I think Acme is.

I recently read your post on why the NFT ecosystem is blowing up and how Acme is playing a role in that and thought it was really interesting. The fact that Acme provides a platform for non-technical people to get into the world of NFTs is huge and will play a big role in making blockchain accessible to more people.

I've been building a lot in React and noticed that the frontend of your platform is built with React. I'm just getting started in my dev journey but am looking to meet people I'd love to work for.

You seem like one of those people.

Do you have any room on your team for an eager-to-learn React developer to help you build out an amazing UI for Acme?

I'd absolutely love to work for you. You can check out some of my work on GitHub and my writing on my blog to get to know me better.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Kenny*

Simple. Honest. Direct.

Those are the key elements you want to hit when sending out emails like this. Something very similar to this led to my first job.

Keep in mind that the goal of these emails is not necessarily to get hired, although that is certainly possible and would be awesome.

The main goal is to get on peoples' radar and start meeting people so that even if now is not a good time and you are not a good fit for them, you are on their mind when that changes, or they can refer you to others who you might be a better fit for.

If you want to really blow them out of the water, build a small custom project just for them and send it over. I recommend taking a look at Crash for more on that.

Now that you know why this works and how to do it, let's go over a sample daily plan you can use to get started.

Your Step-by-Step Plan

Get Your Foundation Set Up

If you don't already have a GitHub and Hashnode account (or another public blog) set up, do that now. If you prefer to use YouTube or a podcast, get that set up.

You need to have a foundation to build on before you start building.

Block Out Time

This part is usually overlooked but super important. Block out time to do these things on your calendar and stick to it every day.

I recommend an hour per day if you are able, but do what you can with your particular schedule.

Create Something

My favorite way of creating things is by following a course or tutorial and then creating something unique on my own using the same concept.

So find a course or tutorial you like, follow along to learn the basics, then build something on your own that utilizes the same concepts.

This is how you'll learn the best and what will stand out most in your portfolio.

This is your task for the first day.

Write Something

Now that you made something, write about it! Take what you just made and walk people through how you did it, lessons learned, challenges overcome, etc.

Your only goal is to share what you are learning and working on. You don't have to pretend to be an authority on something if you aren't. Focus on learning and building in public.

You can continue with this alternating creating and writing if it works for you, or you can write as you go and ship code and a blog post on the same day.

Experiment with both to see what works best for you.

Start Your List

As you go through your day and read content and interact with people, start developing that list of people to contact we talked about earlier.

Write Your First Email

Now take one of those people and write your first email using the template I gave you above. Be sure to modify it to suit your communication style.

That's it. You now have a blueprint for building a successful dev career.

Please don't overthink this. The most important thing is to actually take action and do something. Yes, it will be hard and uncomfortable, anything worth doing always is.

But the more you do it the easier it gets, the better you'll be at it, and the more opportunities will come your way.

---

My name is Kenny. I write in-depth, practical guides on JavaScript development and building a fulfilling career as a developer.

Read more of my stuff and get notified whenever I write something new at my personal site: krgrs.dev