Today I’ll talk about something a bit different; the reason why I started writing this blog in the first place. That reason is John Sonmez, who runs the Simple Programmer. I first heard of John on episode 187 of the Ruby Rogues where he talked about “Marketing Yourself as a Software Developer”. John succeeded in making me excited about the subject and I have since started this blog and promised myself to write at least one post every week. I really felt that John was on to something and it connects nicely with articles I’ve been reading about controlling your public profile and being seen. Do you have control over your public profile? What shows up when you google your name?

So who is this John Sonmez fellow then? John is not only a programmer and writer, he also hosts the podcast “Get up and Code” which is about fitness and health for programmers. I found the theme interesting since it’s so specific and I gave it a listen. Since I’m so committed to listening, I decided to listen to the entire back catalog. So far I’ve listened to about 35 episodes and I really like it! It’s a friendly podcast with interesting guests, but I must admit that it was even better when Iris Classon was a co-host.

As you can notice, I love to dive in head first into things I get excited about. This is no different. I’ve read a lot of John’s blog posts and there’s plenty of interesting stuff there. I even went and got myself John’s course on “How to market yourself” and I’m working my way though it. It’s very interesting; I might write a post about the course when I’m done with it. John also have a book out called “Soft Skills: The software developer’s life manual” which I will read when I’m done with the marketing course.

John has a free blog course that I signed up for. One of the lessons is to write about the course. The course takes you through how to choose a good theme for your blog and then helps you to get going with everything from creating a backlog for content to writing about to how to host your blog and on what platform.

It will be an interesting journey, and I look forward to helping programmers everywhere. This will be a good way to channel my curiosity and urge to learn all that I can.

You can find John’s blog here (http://simpleprogrammer.com) and the blog course here (http://devcareerboost.com/blog-course/).

If you want to read more about being the invisible programmer you can read this post by Troy Hunt: “The ghost who codes: how anonymity is killing your programming career”.