Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of JavaScript Jabber not JavaScript. This isn't Star Wars JavaScript of the VV. My name is Steve Edwards. I am the host with the most Today with me on the panel, we have Dan Shapiro, Hey.
Hey, coming from the lockdown Tel Aviv. Inside the lockdown israel A j O'Neill, Yo yo.
Yo, coming at you live from the sunny woodlands of Virginia with wood chips and places I didn't even know I had.
And with us today our special guest is Mrod Stern. How you doing, Marod, I'm fine.
Thank you for having me.
Good our praysure to have you. So to start out, once you give us a little introduction, just brief a bit about yourself, what you do while you're famous, and we'll go from there.
Okay, I'm not famous. I'm a father of four and it's a crazy there in all the time, but now in the lockdown because of the coronavirus, it's even more crazier. It's crazier. I'm at the Global Death Communities manager atwiks dot Com. I love blogging, I love to take part in the communities, and I really love everything related to branding. Especially personal branding, which.
Is exactly what we're going to talk about today. So why don't we dive right into the topic, and I guess give us a description of what you mean by the term personal branding.
Okay, So basically I think that personal branding the same as branding. It's what comes up on your mind when you actually think about someone or some company. What's the first thing that you associate with it. Sometimes when I speak with people about that subject, we came into a conclusion that our mind is like working with Google search engine.
You put in a term, a name, or a company or whatever you want, and there's like a few results and when you give the name, for example, Dan shapiir Uh, it's I hope it's okay to take you in a So what pops into my mind is performance. Now, dance is a lot more than just someone who takes part in the performance world. Very high skill developers is much
more than that. But the things that Dan is doing online offline, and we can take it because it's it's super interesting to talk about it, but the things he do actually brings him closer and closer to the term performance. So the same goes with huge companies and the same goes with personnel people.
Now, when you're talking about personal branding and the people that we want to talk about who this is relevant to, we're not talking about everybody Joe blow off the street, are we? Or are you thinking more of people in the technic specifically in the technological world or maybe the sports world who are trying to sell things. What subset of people do you think this personal branding is important for?
Yes, so, actually I think it's important to everyone. Everyone can benefit from putting attention into their personal brand and doing stuff. And we'll talk about what stuff is, but doing more to promote their name and to get it closer to the terms, the professional terms that they want
to be associated with. In my daily work, I work closely with developers, so I can or maybe I know more about doing those stuff and actually having your aim build up in the developers community, what's related to open source contribution, meetups, events, podcasting. Just as you do, I do get the opportunity when I'm asked to to speak with small business owners and you see that personal branding is also.
Very value to them. But in different world, in.
The world of customers and products and things like that. When you talk about the world of technology, from JavaScript to Skaala to funton and end and mobile and all things technology. It's it's a bit different. I think that it's different with platforms. For example, we see that Twitter is super important for developer. Twitter is the place today.
When you, for example, compare it with Facebook, you see that Twitter is the place where developers talk within themselves and brings up all kinds of technology issues and engineering insights on that platform. So there are all kinds of differences. And actually this is the place that I love because I love technology. A word about myself. I'm not a developer. I learned to develop, but I wouldn't hire me as
a developer. But because I learned development myself, I do know the terms, so I know to talk with developers and actually bringing or crossing the gap between branding and maybe say a bit of marketing themselves and their world of engineering.
So when we're talking about brands and personal branding, what examples come to your mind of good brands or examples where branding has really worked well, whether maybe it's large or or small.
Well when we talked about brands, and here's another important issue about effort, because I think that many listeners will say, I don't care about my personal branding. I have skills that I are very high demand in the industry, and I'm all good and I don't need that. But if you take into account the amount of effort, time consuming and money spent of huge brands like Apple, Nike, or Coca Cola, you'll see that they never stop. They never
stop promoting themselves and investing in their brand. And if you can ask me, I'll say, I'll never forget the Apple brand whatever, I never forget it. I use their products, I like the brand. I never forget it. But it doesn't matter. They keep on spending so much effort on branding. So you must stop and ask yourself, if those huge brands are not stopping investing in it, what us the
people are not getting. And I think that the same as big brands, small brands or personal brands are super important because at the end, I think we have some kind of value in the industry. We can be super good at what we're doing and bring value. But I think that at the end, you need people to know about it. You need more people to know about it. And if I think about all kinds of examples, so you can see people like Dana Vamov, for example, and I like bringing this example to my peers and to.
Developers that I work.
With, because Dana Bramov, if I'm not mistaken, today, has something like two hundred and forty thousand followers on Twitter, and things that he says, for example, are making a lot of noise and people respond and follow him for a reason. But he never you know, he wasn't born Dan Obamov and got that Twitter account and all his assets that.
Oh he was born he was I can interject he was born Dan. Yes, yes, he was born at Dan at Twitter. That's for sure true.
So so it's a journey and it takes time. He's a good example of the things that he's doing and how he's building building it. I do think that, you know what, I do have an example that will also illustrate an obstacle that they see.
Interject before you give that example. I really what you're saying really resonates with me because as we know, as we all know, this is being recorded in the beginning of April, and this is a very problematic time all around the world with the whole coronavirus thing. And I keep seeing on Twitter people who I never expected to see in this kind of a position tweeting out that
they've lost their job and are looking for employment. It's certainly not an easy period for anybody, but having to face unemployment on top of everything else is certainly a big deal. And undoubtedly when you have a more significant brand, personal brand, it becomes much easier for you to be able to land your next position or get hired again.
And like you said, just the fact that you know that you are good at what you do might have been sufficient let's let's say even two or three months ago, but all of a sudden today it may not be sufficient because you know, if you if nobody outside your company knows who you are, what you can do, what you're capable of, then it's going to be much more difficult for you to find your next your next job,
your next position. On the other hand, if you can tweet out that you know you're looking for a job, and a lot of people know you and will retreat your tweet, and people are out there will say, oh, I heard about this guy. He's really good.
You should hire him.
And so there are positions out there, but they're just more difficult to get to so I think we're definitely now experiencing the importance of having this recognized, recognizable brand and a good brand associated with yourself.
Actually, this is a great comment, and I do want to elaborate with two things that I've come across in my life. One was when I worked in a company, not the company that I worked today, and there was a period where there started firing people globally. One of the things that people started doing was to address me, come to me and ask me to sit with them and work on their LinkedIn account, especially, but on their you know, other digital assets, in writing and so on.
And I remember that I was so frustrated saying them, look, I'll help you whatever you need. But I was so frustrated because the time to start working on those things is not in emergency emergency time, not once you need to land a job you start working on those stuff. That's it's it's never too late, right, But that's not the time. It should come when you're where you're doing okay, and it should come when you enjoy that, enjoy the journey, enjoy sharing your stuff. And we will talk about it too.
But this is one thing that I wanted to share, and another one that when you talked about being more valuable as someone who is potentially can can join your company. That's one another thought. Another side of personal branding which I saw lately was that the things you do outside, the things you share externally, the brand that you build for yourself, can also raise your value within the company.
We have a developer that was he has his own open source project and he was mentioned on Jess Weekly twice. By the way, Dan Shapier was mentioned on Jess Weekly also, But it's not done, Shapelle, and.
You're going to make me blush very significantly before this is over. Let's let's take it. Let's use example to other people.
You know, it's I said, it's it's someone else. You also, well, you, you were also mentioned on that newsletter. But but I'm referring to someone else. And he told me that one of his team members wasn't aware of the things that he's doing on the community of open source and contributing. And then he read his name, his size, name of his team member on Jess Weekly and he was astonished. He was amazed to see his name and he said, Wow,
I can't believe you're you're being manage here. So what happened is inside his team it was now considered to be a star because he was mentioned. So you see that it's two side. It has the external side. Yes, people know you outside your company. It might help you in the future, it might not, but it's also bring more weight to your presence within the company you already in, which is cool, super cool.
I think we've done a pretty good job of establishing what personal branding is and why you would want to do it. So let's move on to the how. So what what are the platforms or tools that in our environment, our world as software developers are best for building this brand.
I'll start with the with the beginning. You know, there's the Nikes Moto, just do it. I'll start with something else, just scheduling. I see, because developers are super busy, we always have things to do. But one thing that I've noticed is that we're like really working on our calendar and really really following our calendar. So if we just schedule one hour forty five minutes at the beginning, just once a month week, that can be a good starting point in just having the time to sit down and
start doing. Now here's the doing and the platforms and everything that should be taken into account. One is the mapping. What is your territory? Are you front end developer, backend developer? And within that, what are the terms that you are the technological term that you want to be associated with. What are the things that you like to do? What are the things that naturally, without anybody you know, making you,
you go out and read. You can see the things that you read again without anyone making you do that, and you can assemble the things or the territory that you want to be part of and make your voice be heard. So, as said, mapping what do or what's my territory? And if you do a good job at that mapping, you also map people who are considered to be thought leaders, who are the thought leaders in that territory in your industry, and you can stop following them.
What do they do? Are the writing?
Are their podcasting? You can learn so much by just observing what others are doing that you'll be amazed to how quickly you can learn. And it's not rocket science. Okay, it's not rocket science. It's a lot of attention so looking at people who are already doing it. And here's another point that it's super important.
It's a journey.
It's like going to the gym. It's not one time thing and there you go, it's running by itself. No, it's always about doing, and it's also about really giving a value. And the more you accurate with your mapping, the more accurate value that you can bring. And things that I find valuable to me as someone who is working on personal branding and marketing and so on in the high tech industry might not be valuable to someone
else in a different industry. So the more you accurate with the mapping, the more accurate value that you can bring to the table. Now, bringing that value is based on your actually knowledge the things you know to do a learned or experienced I think that if we start looking at platforms, I'll take a step back and say, let's talk about content at the end. Platform is a platform. It's the place where content can come to life. Content content, content,
It's always about the content. Content is actually the way to take your insights, the value that you can bring to the industry, the things that you know, learn and so on, and explain them. It can be a blog post, it can be a podcast, it can be YouTube, it can be an open source project, it can be a usert, it's really everything, and it can be tweeted and it can be shared on LinkedIn. But it's about the content. It's about good content. And you know, this is a
very interesting point about content and doing for developers. One. The web is sometimes sadly for really bad things, and when developers, yes, yes, actually it is. But when developers step step up and take an active part in the discussion online and share professional stuff, we actually take and I'm saying it's it sounds big, right, but we as a humanity take a step forward. That's good stuff. This is the good stuff that we need.
So this is.
Point one point two that I keep hearing when I work with developers is everybody knows what I know. That's like the most or the biggest obstacle that people face. Everybody knows what I know, and it's strong. Developers came and today are being part of this company, that company, this start of whatever, whatever they do. They know something that most of the population doesn't know.
You have.
Valuable knowledge and you should express it and not stop yourself with everybody knows what I know. No, that's not true.
So I want to bring up an example. I think everybody or an experience I think everybody here has had. So you go to learn how to do something and there's a vital piece of information that's missing, Like, for example, you use Node for the first time and you find all these things about repositories for no, but you can't find any way to how to install note on Linux.
Let's say that that were the case something like that, where like there's something and like all the pieces are there except for the thing that if you're reading the document, everybody just assumes you must know that, and you go searching for it and you don't know what to search for.
You're obviously missing something.
And then when you finally figure it out, it's something so simple. It was like you needed to copy and paste two lines, and so then you don't document it either, you know. But the person who finally does, the person who finally says, Okay, I'm going to take these two steps from this website and these three steps from this website, and I'm going to create my own blog post that has all five steps in the same place.
Like that becomes a winner.
Yeah. I can give a classic example of that. AJ When I was you know, I first started out in open source development working on druple at one of the agencies I used to work with. This was about ten years ago. One of my big things was a patche Solar because integration with the Patchy Solar search engine was coming really popular at the time. Getting it installed and SYNCD up was really difficult, especially if you wanted a
multi index setup. So I took this blog. I pieced everything together from like three or four different blog posts. I finally got all put together, so I wrote on our company's website. I wrote one blog post that said, okay, and I think it's still out there, here's how you install and get a multi index solar set up with Drupal seven. And I put it out there and it was one of those things and I know you've mentioned this before EAJA two where I would go back to
that myself, you know, because you know i'd google it. Oh, here's my own post on how to do this, because it's the way I think. Well, a couple months later, I was in chatting with one of our other developers who looked at the website statistics and our owner and the other guy mentioned by the way is far and
away our most popular post has been this one. On Drupel and a Patchi's solar because it was a how to put everything together in one place where you could follow step by step, and it just made it really popular because it helped other people. Even though the pieces were out there, they hadn't been put together in a good way.
So, yeah, there's three pieces of content I've had like that. There's a stack overflow post on how to resolve get merged conflicts, and I think that's still popular today. For a couple of years, I had the number one hit on on how to install Ruby on Ubuntu with RVM, and then there was also for a couple of years, I had the number one hit for how to publish a package to NPM. And these are all things that
people have been doing for years. But it's just that scenario of like you had to go to two different blog posts to get the information. Anybody anybody who's going to more than one blog post to get information. If you create a post that puts that information in one post, you've got you know, you really do have actual, real potential to be the number one hit on Google for that one thing.
If I can add to that. And it's a point that kind of addresses the two points that Murad brought up because Moad was talking about the fact that a you want to be consistent and that b you want to put stuff out there even if you think that.
Other people know it.
And I think the way that you can hit both these nails on the head is basically to blog your journey. I know that a lot of people actually do that that they whenever they learn new stuff, one of their techniques to actually learning it is to kind of try to explain it into a blog post and also kind
of document their journey. And like you said, even they themselves can come back together to that and use it as a resource for themselves certainly for others, and that simultaneously solves both problems because if you you know, you become consistent because you document what you do into a blog post and you put out their valuable content because there you know, there will always be people behind you
in the journey. So wherever you are, there are people who are on their way to that point, and you'll just make life easier for them. Now, I wish I personally was much more consistent in applying this advice, but I know from people who are really successful bloggers that this technique has worked really really well for them.
Simplest way to do it, because there's the whole yak shaving, like, well, I want to do this, but to do that, I need to do this. To do that, I need to do this. It's not good for branding necessarily, but you can use get hubjists and when you do that, all the branding goes to get hub. But gethubjist is a good way to do it, and at least you get your username in there and then you know later it's
pretty easy to take a gethubjist. It's just a markdown file and you know, put it into a blog and you could host that on GitHub pages and you could use a c name record pointed at gethub pages to get your own branding, so instead of you know, gethub dot com, it would actually show my cool username dot com.
Yeah, but even if that doesn't happen, I know that a lot of potential employers look at GitHub activity as a means to vet possible employees. So even if you just get all that activity and views and stars on GitHub, even if it's not like your name doesn't become famous, employers will still look at that and take that into account.
So effect you are building.
Your brand even if you know you're not stopped in the streets because people don't recognize you.
I do want to say something about about what just said. It's not about being famous. It's more about the journey. It's about the passion to share things that you learned, and it's it's to be part.
Of the community.
Being famous, you might get that, but it's not. It shouldn't be the result or it shouldn't be the goal because you need to enjoy it. And being famous is something that takes a lot of time. And never forget that you're like famous in a very specific area.
Yeah, but you want you want that impression. You want people to see your name or in your profile picture so that when they're like, oh, yeah, I remember reading your article about this thing in JavaScript, I remembering your art.
You know. It's the impressions over time.
It's about really helping others and really bringing value to the table. And one of the results is yes, they will maybe remember you or stuff like that, because you never know who reads your stuff. I'll give you an example.
When I was four years back younger, I found a data security flaws in Israeli ro Rove cove is a ticket that you go on train and buses with it, and I found that if you do some things with it, you can find the owner's I D six latest trips that he or she done, where he or she lives, and stuff like that. And I was in a set of mind of if I managed to do that and get that information using this and that everybody could do that.
But even so I was passionate enough to sit down and write about experience with this lovecome this ticket and from here and there. Two days after that, I was approached by one of our leading news sites and they asked to actually take that piece and publish it on their site, the news site. And two days after that, the government has actually assembled an emergency discussion about that ticket, just because I documented what I did and what the
information I was able to take out and shouldn't. So you never know who see what the things that you publish up there. You never know. And sometimes you managed to create an impact, and it's far better than being famous or whatever, because you actually made something happened for the best, for the good. So I think maybe that should be some kind of a goal, making an impact, because you actually change something that otherwise you thought unreachable.
That's another angle to all kinds of doing online stuff and working on your personal brand. And another angle that I think we should cover is that taking an active part in your brand and building your brand and your voice and being a prominent voice actually works on your soft skills. Every developer. Good developers got really good art skills. They know how to code, they know to build apps
and so on. But soft skills the way that you can communicate your ideas, the way that you can express the things you want to express, convincing, leading our stuff that are super important, super import and by sitting down and actually writing an article, for example, you actually work and craft your writing skills. Maybe at the beginning it's a bit hard, but the more you practice, the more you publish, the more you read other stuff, you actually
work on your soft skills. And again, if we talk about your personal value, what you bring to the table, you actually bring more value to your organization. Another great soft skills that you can think about is the way to communicate with people and actually expand your networking, the way that you can reach out and make partnerships and do things together with different organizations and maybe government offices
and whatever. The word is huge. The more you practice, the more your name is well, more familiar what you do, and more people trust you. And this is another angle. When someone is being consist and keep on bringing value to the discussion, whatever the industry, the topics and so on, he's being more trusted. And when you bring all this into account, you can make more impact, you actually being more valuable to the place you're part of.
Going back to what we were talking about famous, I think the good example that comes to mind is you want to be famous, as you were saying, maurd about doing something and providing information, providing helpful things as compared to being famous like the Kardashians. Let's for saying, it comes to mind, you know, they're famous for what for
being famous? I mean, yeah, they're pretty, but they're just famous for being famous as compared to your example Murada Dan Abramarb or what comes to mind for me as Eric hanschat a West boss of Scott Tlensky, people who put out stuff that's informational and helped people do their jobs.
So but to touch on that it can be intimidating, you know, especially when somebody is starting out is saying like, what what is the likelihood of me becoming another west Boss or or another Dana Brahmov or whatever. And first of all, of like what said at the beginning, they didn't start out that way. They got to that point by working hard and putting out a lot of useful content. But the other point is that you don't necessarily need
to get that far. What I like to think about is the fact that, you know, in the past, when I'm thinking about my parents' generation, they spent their entire career often within a single organization at at you know, they they started working there, they worked there all the way to retirement, and that was that. And these days people switch jobs every three years, two years, four years. So and when you're switching job, you keep on selling
yourself again and again. And if you've got a good brand going for you, better than the average, it doesn't have to be a West Boss level brand, it just needs to be better than the average, then effectively you've done marketing for yourself. So you're not just coming in as a salesperson trying to sell some product that nobody's seen before, because they know you're meeting them and they've
never heard of you before. That meeting. Now you've done some marketing in advance of the selling process, and in the same way that this works for companies and for products, it works for your benefit. And even having a little bit of marketing goes a long way than having no marketing at all.
Okay, So I think let's go back down the route we started to go a little while ago and we got back off. Do we well? First of all, let me put it this way, Murad, is there anything we want to cover as part of the why and what you want to show share and the benefits of it? And we covered everything there.
I think we did.
Okay, so let's talk. Let's get back to how so you've mentioned before, you know the popular ones. I think the obvious ones are blogs, Twitter, maybe YouTube videos. You want to talk about those in any more detail, particular method for utilizing those platforms.
Okay? Sure. So at the beginning, let's split let's split it into two, the online and the offline. Basically, it's easier to start with the online, but we shouldn't ignore the offline. And I'll talk about it in a second regarding online, and you can start with the mindset whatever I learned. If it's valuable enough, let's share it. One of the great stuff about being part of the high tech industry is that we must learn as a daily habits.
We every day we must learn selfie, we read technical blogs, we go and actually get updates about all kinds of development issues and bugs and updates that are going on. We need to keep ourselves really up to date learning all day learning. And if you just put yourself in a mindset of learning and actually feeling that you learn, being presents as you learn, and understanding that what you do now when you sit down and read your Twitter feed, when you read this article, is that you are learning.
You can easily and very fast create mini content. What my two cents about that I just read this. Here's my two cents. That can be a tweet, that can be a very short blog post, but I'm taking it things that is happening anyway, like reading something professional and actually me chewing it and giving it back with my point of view. So this is one thing that we should start with. I really recommend any.
Developer to check and you know.
Like cleaning and removing dust from his or her LinkedIn account and Twitter account, because at the end, when someone is searching your name, he or she will find your digital assets. So whatever is out there, make sure that it's look good. It shouldn't you know, it might be not super active or maybe not active, but it looks okay and reflect what you do. So this is another thing that you should take into account. And then you
can take a step deeper. You can say, okay, after mapping and we talked about mapping, and here's my territory, this is the things that I want to talk about. Here's the thought leaders that I should follow and see what they these guys are doing.
Now we really want to take.
A step deeper and start creating content that reflect my understanding in that in that industry. So then you can consider.
Maybe open up a blog or.
Maybe just start, you know, tweeting more often, but make sure that your tweets are being more and more about those topics you might want to consider. I don't know, podcasting and somethings. Podcasting and writing a blog post are making people frighten because it looks so time consuming and things that only the greatest know how to do. But
that's not true. You need to just sit down and do that and feel really comfortable with both the top that you want to talk about and the platform that you want to use, if it's writing or talking about it, or making videos or just you know, contributing code and to get up and stuff like that. This is the online This is everything that you can do right now.
But in order to do you know, like three hundred and sixty degrees of building your brand and making a prominent voice in the industry, you should also consider doing things offline, for example, meetups working on forty five one hour talk that you can deliver in front of an audience when it's allowed. Now we're in a period of time that you know, because of the coronavirus, we can't do that, but we can do online meetups. Again, it's
a talk. It's a talk by you about the subject that you passionate about and you want to share your insight with others. And that's that's great because you actually create content. The content is your insights, is your talk. It's also your PowerPoint or whatever app that use. But then you can share it online on slideshair and stuff like that. So you have a talk, and I don't know many meetups that I know are also doing video of the talks. So when you go up on stage,
and many people don't like to do that. Again, it's more about the soft skills and the courage to go up and say here's what I know and I can share that with you, And many people are finding to do that and talk you know, public speaking. But taking that step and going up on stage and making you know or working on the skills of public speaking actually empowers.
You a lot.
So offline and online are basically working together. And you know, I can see many meetups where someone is going up on stage and then people in the audience are tweeting about him or her and about the things they talk about, and there you can see how the offline and actual event is being discussed online. And if the Twitter account of the presenter is strong enough and people aware of it, so they tag him or her, so the discussion can go and get stronger online and actually close that circle
and making it more empowered. So if we talk about starting I would start with scheduling time because we're super busy and time is something that we've missed. So scheduling forty five minutes one hour, maybe a week at the beginning at least. Then start mapping what I want to talk about, who are the thought leaders in my industry. I would even add what are the spatial dates in my industry? All kinds of software that were released in that date, so I can talk about it when it's relevant.
And events, of course, if there are global events that are related to my industry, you want to be part of it. But begin with.
Mapping because then you know where you're going.
And what are the stakeholders that you should engage with. And then it's actually sitting and understanding how you want to express your ideas, how do you want to engage with your audience, and how do you want and where you want to build your audience, and understand that whatever you choose, you are not going to break the internet at the beginning, because it's a journey. And at the beginning you might feel that you talk to a wall and no one answer you and no one cares about
what you do. But that's not true because everything you do has some kind of impact and you never know who looks and read the stuff you do, and step by step you build your audience, you build up the people seem in oar mind like you that at the end you can give value and you can get value from your activities, and you know what, you can even enjoy it because one of the things that when I talk with developers that comes up is that you know, you can sit down on your desk and code all
day long and do a great job, that's for sure, But having or taking an active part in the community sometimes bring up all kinds of invitation of taking part in I don't know, some conference abroad where they want you to talk, so you fly there and you add actually go up on stage and you present your company. That's a huge win for your company, not just for you, and it actually brings spice to your career, to your
daily coding routine. So it's actually another cool stuff as not just you know, as I pointed the famous which I'm against, it's also another great aspect of these activities.
One thing about content that I want to bring up that I don't think has been mentioned, and I've seen it come up recently as being fairly prevalent is owning your content. The particular use case that comes to mind is blogging on something like Medium. So I know, when Medium first came out, it's really popular and everybody's saying blog on Medium, blog on Medium. Your content's that much more visible, and so on and so forth. So then
medium starts adding requirements. You know, they want you to sign up for a membership to be able to read this, and there's various limitations. So all of a sudden, I started seeing a lot more people saying, maybe we shouldn't be blogging on media. Maybe you should own your own content, put it on your own blog that you have hosted, whether it's you know, something a static site generator and get hub pages, or you know, whatever the case may be.
And mediums started I don't know if they're still doing this, but they were at least testing this where super popular people on Medium that posted content they got lots of views. They made paid content, so they'd show you the first paragraph and be like, okay, you've watch you've you've watched five of five popular exactly yes views this month.
Now you need to subscribe to view more.
Right, It's like it's a company that is taking the content you produce for free and monetizing it exactly.
So I think that's pretty important too. I know one platform that I've seen used and I've heard about it, and I've started using myself as dev dot two dev dot t O and one of the cool things I just started blogging that I put a blog post on there I think last week or something like that, is they allow you to say, okay, this is a canonical link for my blog post, and you could point it to your own platform. So I'm just curious to see more what your experiences or thoughts on content ownership.
Well, I'm not going to dip into this platform or another platform, because I think that platforms go up and down, and there's trends in that and this. I think that whatever you do, and again, without you know, talking legally, the things that you publish are mostly or your content. This is something that you write. And again I'm not super familiar with the things you said about medium. If it's theirs or yours, and I wouldn't you know what, I wouldn't even think about it at the beginning of
my journey. I would just start doing and start writing and start publishing. I think it's I hope it's answered the question.
I have to agree with Morad on this. I think that obviously, if you find yourself to be a regular blogger and you blog day in, day out, and you're starting to get the following, then it's then it might be definitely worthwhile to like think about where you want your content to reside and stuff like that, But at the very beginning, I think it's more important than anything else is just to get your content out there. And if that literally means just finding the easiest platform to
use for you, then just go for it. Anything is better than just procrastinating.
Yeah, and you know what, there's even one thing that no one can take from you, and that's the skills that you developed during the process. I can tell you on my free time when I have some I like managing my Telegram John. I have a channel on Telegram. It almost had two thousand subscribers, and I usually update there on all kinds of technology news and stuff like that. Actually, it's a very interesting story of how I build it. It was built because a visit of GitHub in Israel,
but it's a different story anyway. In order to promote my channel, I wanted to create video that actually sums up the latest updates that I've published, and for me, video editing was magic. I looked at YouTube and I saw videos and it was like black box. I couldn't understand how people provide this amazing stuff. The sounds effect and the transitions and the lightning and everything. I was amazed and it was a magic to me and something that I really wanted to crack down. So I sat
down and learned video editing. Super not related to what I do on my daily job, but I sat down and learn it another It's not soft skills, it's just knowledge. But it made me think in another way of how presenting my ideas, summarize things that I did, and so on, and marketing my telegram channel. It was, you know, a step that I took, pure learning. And when I look at it today, when I know video editing and the
magic is no magic at all, I see through. And when I do my job, my daily job, and I have my video person who is responsible to all kinds of content video that we have and so on, I know how to talk with him. I know what to demand from him, I know what he's doing, and then I can really you know, communicate and get a better product and content for my daily job and what I do.
So it's so great to take an active step, an active point of view and understanding of cracking and learning whatever you can and writing down, you know, just sit down and look at well known blog posts and ask yourself, Wow, how he or she did that? So many shares, so many comments.
I can never do that.
That's crazy, but it's not. It's just sitting down and learning and breaking the magic until you own it. And from soft skill to heart skills, we always on the learning path. The moment we know, the more we I think can bring to the table and have more value and so on. My point is that I wouldn't consider this is a content that is mine or not just sit down and start, because the starting point is the the point where great stuff can happen regarding the things that you know how to do and deal with.
So we're getting close to the end of our time here. So before we moved the pics, is there anything else we're missing you want to cover real quick, Moron or anybody else?
You know what, I'll just mention that one of the great stuff that I heard, and it really sit down good with what we've talked about, was when President Barack Obama, former President of the United States, Barack Obama, he said in one of his video and promoting I think it was Hour of the Code or Hour of Code. It was initiative of teaching kids to code and in that video, he was addressing kids and teenagers and he asked them to be in the sake set of mind of being
active and not passive. He said, don't play something like, don't play with the app, create the app. And I think that it's so deep and when we talk and if I try to sum up everything we talked about personal branding and being active and being a prominent voice in your industry, it's about state of mind of actually being active and creating and not just consuming content. That's a point that I really like.
Okay, cool, Yeah, we've got the link here, so we'll make sure and drop that into the show notes so everybody can see that video.