Personal Brand - Part 2

In part one, I gave a little back story about myself and how, by failing to manage my "personal brand," I set myself up for a really rough transition out of my current job. One of the great things about owning up to your own mistakes is that you can then do something about it. It is yours to own, it is yours to fix.

I have resolved myself to doing a few things this year to both help promote myself and showcase my capabilities, but to also give back to those who have helped me. I have used a lot of open source, but I have failed, miserably, to give back. That is really wrong and something I want to turn around this year. Really, without thinking, it is easy to pull down everybody else's hard work, through NuGet, and have an app up and running so quickly these days. It is very easy to forget that you're being a heavy consumer, even when you're producing.

Well, I would love to get involved in open source and actually contribute something. My hesitation has been mostly driven by my current employment situation. If something I wrote in open source looked like something I used at work, it would cause some issues. Well, I am on my way out, starting a new chapter, and to hell with it. I want to give back to the community and, hopefully, help somebody out there on the interwebz have a better development experience.

Something else that I have failed to do was keep some sort of blog. It is a bit narcissistic to have one and so I have always had trouble with the idea of putting my random thoughts out on the wire and expecting people to want to read it. But, I realized, this is for me. I am writing to keep track of my own personal progress. It is a way for me to measure my personal growth, keep track of things I'd otherwise forget, and, again, hopefully give back to somebody out there.

While I would love for this experience to produce some magical employment opportunity in the future, that's not really what it is about.

So, I will be working to blog more, tweet more, get involved in open source, and be an all around more giving person on the internet (and IRL). If you have a project on which you want help, post a comment, send me an email, hit me up on Twitter, something. For the time being, I will probably troll around GitHub and look around some more. I really like what Mark Rendle is doing with Simple.Web, so I might fiddle with that a bit until I settle down on a project or two.

I realize that my "lack of experience" on my résumé is going to haunt me for a while. I could, technically, have skipped the Air Force and just focused solely on me and what I want, but that wouldn't have been any good either. So, here I am, taking my first steps to being a better person, managing my own personal brand, and expecting to make a change—somewhere.