The JSJ panel talks with Morad Stern from Wix about personal branding; what it is, why it’s important for developers, and how to build it.

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of JavaScript Jabber, not JavaScript, this isn't Star Wars, JavaScript to the Vee. My name is Steve Edwards. I am the host with the most today. With me on the panel we have Dan Shappir. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Hey, hey, coming from the lockdown of Tel Aviv inside the lockdown Israel. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: AJ O'Neil.

AJ_O’NEAL: Yo, yo, yo, coming at you live from the sunny woodlands of Virginia with woodchips in places I didn't even know I had. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: And with us today, our special guest is Morad Stern. How are you doing, Murad? 

MORAD_STERN: I'm fine. Thank you for having me. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Good. It's our pleasure to have you. 

 

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STEVE_EDWARDS: So to start out, why don't you give us a little introduction, just a brief bit about yourself, what you do, why you're famous, and we'll go from there. 

MORAD_STERN: Okay, I'm not famous. I'm a father of four and it's crazier in all the time, but now in the lockdown, because of the coronavirus, it's even more crazier. It's crazier. I'm the global dev communities manager at Wix.com. I love blogging. I love to take part in the communities and I really love everything related to branding, especially personal branding. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: 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. 

MORAD_STERN: 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 Shappir, I hope it's okay to take you in the example, Dan. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, don't. 

MORAD_STERN: So what pops into my mind is performance. Now, Dan is a lot more than just someone who takes part in the performance world, very high skilled developers. He's much more than that. But the things that Dan is doing online, offline, and we can take it because 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 personal people. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: 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 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?

MORAD_STERN: 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 name build up in the developer's 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 valid to them. But in different, 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 Scala to Fontaine 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. I worry 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 

STEVE_EDWARDS: 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 small? 

MORAD_STERN: Well, when we talk 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 product. I like the brand. I'll 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 Dan Avramov, for example, and I like bringing this example to my peers and to developers that I work with, because Dan Avramov, if I'm not mistaken, today has something like 240,000 followers on Twitter making a lot of noise and people respond and follow him for a reason. But he never, you know, he wasn't born, than a bum of and got that Twitter account and all his assets that. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, he was born. He was like an interject. He was born down a bramble. Yes, yes. He wasn't born at Dan Abramov at Twitter. That's for sure. 

MORAD_STERN: True, true. 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 it. I do think that, you know what, I do have an example that will also illustrate an obstacle that we see. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: If I can interject, before you give that example, what you're saying really resonates with me because 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 say, even or three months ago, but all of a sudden today it may not be sufficient because, you know, 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 job, your next position. On the other hand, if you can tweet out that 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 recognizable brand and a good brand associated with yourself. 

MORAD_STERN: 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 work today, and there was a period where they 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 and 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 time need to land a job, you start working on those stuff. It's never too late, right? But that's not the time. It should come when 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 join your company, that's one. 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 JS Weekly twice. By the way, Dan Shappir was mentioned on JS Weekly also, but it's not Dan Shappir. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: You're going to make me blush very significantly before this is over. Let's use examples of other people. 

MORAD_STERN: I said it's someone else. You were also mentioned on that newsletter, 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, he saw his name of his team member on JS Weekly and he was astonished. He was amazed to see his name and he said, wow, I can't believe you're being mentioned here. So what happened is inside his team, he was now considered to be a star because he was mentioned. So you see that it's two sides. It has the external side, yes. People know you outside your company. It might help you in the future. It might not. But it also brings more weight to your presence within the company you're already in, which is cool, super cool. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I think we've done a what personal branding is and why you would want to do it. So let's move on to the how. So what are the platforms or tools that in our environment, our world as software developers are best for building this brand? 

MORAD_STERN: I'll start with the beginning. There's the Nike's motto, 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 following our calendar. So if we just schedule one hour, 45 minutes at the beginning, just once a week, that can be a good starting point in just having the time to sit down and start doing. No, no. Here's the doing and the platform and everything that should be taken into account. One is the mapping. What is your territory? Are you front-end developer, back-end 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 start following them. What do they do? Are they writing? Are they 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 rolling 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 or 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 newsletter, it can be 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, full of really bad things. And when developers... 

AJ_O’NEAL: No, no. 

MORAD_STERN: Yes, yes, actually it is. But when developers step up and take an active part in the discussion online and share professional stuff, we actually take the... And I'm saying it sounds big, we as 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 wrong. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Absolutely

MORAD_STERN: and today are being part of this company, that company, this startup, whatever startup, whatever they do, they know something that most of the population doesn't know. You have valued, valuable knowledge and you should express it and not stop yourself with, everybody knows what I know. No, that's not true. 

AJ_O’NEAL: So I wanna bring up an example I think everybody, or an experience I think everybody here has had. 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 Node, but you can't find any way to how to install Node 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, 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. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, I can give a classic example of that AJ. When I was, you know, I first started out, uh, in open source development, working on Drupal at one of the agencies I used to work with. This was about 10 years ago. One of my big things was Apache solar because, uh, integration with Apache solar search engine, uh, was coming really popular at the time. Getting it installed and synced up was really difficult, especially if you wanted a multi-index setup. So I took this blog, I, uh, pieced everything together from like, three or four different blog posts. I finally got it 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 setup with Drupal 7. And I put it out there and it was one of those things. And I know you've mentioned this before, EJJ2, 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 of 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, he says, far and away, our most popular post has been this one on Drupal and Apache Solar, because it was a how-to. I 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. 

AJ_O’NEAL: There's three pieces of content I've had like that. There's a Stack Overflow post on how to resolve Git merge conflicts. And I think that's still popular today. For a couple of years, I had the number one hit 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 had 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. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: If I can add to that, and it's a point that kind of addresses the two points that Morad brought up, because Morad 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 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. 

AJ_O’NEAL: The 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 GitHub gists. And when you do that, all the branding goes to GitHub, but GitHub gist 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 GitHub gist with, that'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 CNAME record pointed at GitHub pages to get your own branding. So instead of, you know, github.com, it would actually show mycoolusername.com. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: 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, 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 in effect you are building your brand even if you're not stopped in the street because people don't recognize you. 

MORAD_STERN: I do want to say something about what AJ 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 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. 

AJ_O’NEAL: Yeah, but you want, you know, what 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 remember reading your article. It's the impressions over time. 

MORAD_STERN: 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 flaw in Israeli Ravkav. Ravkav 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 ID, 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 this experience with this Ravkav, 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. In two days after that, the government has actually assembled an emergency discussion about that ticket, just because I documented what I did and what information I was able to take out and shoot it. So you never know who sees what the things that you publish up there. You never know. And sometimes you manage to create an impact. And it's far better than being famous or whatever because you actually made something happen 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, in building your brand and your voice and being a prominent voice actually works on your soft skill. Every developer, good developers, got really good hard 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, are stuff that are super important, super important. 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 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 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 world 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 consistent 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 be more valuable to the place you're part of. 

 

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STEVE_EDWARDS: 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, Morad, about doing something and providing information, providing helpful things as compared to being famous, like the Kardashians. 

MORAD_STERN: That's for sure. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: It comes to mind. You know, they're famous for, for what? For being famous. I mean, yeah, they're pretty, but they're just famous for being famous as compared to your example, Marada, Dan, Abramov, or what comes to mind for me is Eric Hanshed, a West boss, Scott Tulinski, people who put out stuff that's informational and helps people do their jobs. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: But to touch on that, it can be intimidating, you know, especially when somebody is starting out, is saying like, what is the likelihood of me becoming another West boss or another Dan Abramov or whatever? And First of all, like Morad 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 in the past, when I'm thinking about my parents' generation, they spent their entire career often within a single organization. They just didn't know. They started working there, they worked there all the way till retirement, and that was that. And these days, people switch jobs every three years, two years, four years. And when you're switching jobs, 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've you know you're meeting them and they've never heard of you before that meeting. Now you've got 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. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Okay, so I think, let's go back down the route. We started to go a little while ago and we got back off. Well, first of all, let me put it this way, Morad. Is there anything we wanna cover as part of the why and what you wanna share and the benefits of it? Have we covered everything there? 

MORAD_STERN: I think we did. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Okay, so let's get back to how. So you've mentioned before, the popular ones, I think the obvious ones are blogs, Twitter maybe YouTube videos, you wanna talk about those in a little bit more detail, particular methods for utilizing those platforms? 

MORAD_STERN: Okay, sure. So at the beginning, 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 learn, 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 habit. Every day we must learn something. 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 learned, being present 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 readings, something professional, and actually 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 good. It shouldn't you know 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 the 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 these guys are doing. Now I really want to take a step deeper and start creating content that reflect my understanding in that industry. So then you can consider maybe open up a blog or maybe just start 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 sometimes podcasting and writing a blog post are making people frightened 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 be, feel really comfortable with both the topics 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 into GitHub 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 360 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 45 one-hour talks 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 insights with others. And 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 you use, but then you can share it online on Sleicher and stuff like that. So you have a talk and I don't know how 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 are 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 miss. So scheduling 45 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'll 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 answers 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 reads the stuff you do. And step by step, you build your audience, you build up the people, similar mind like you, that at the end, you can give value, and you can get value from 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 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, as I pointed, the famous, which I'm against, it's also another great aspect of this activities. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: 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 was really popular and everybody's saying, blog on Medium, blog on Medium, your content is that much more visible, 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, hmm, 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 GitHub pages or, you know, whatever the case may be. 

AJ_O’NEAL: And Medium 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 watched five of five popular views this month. Now you need to subscribe to view more. It's like it's a company that is taking the content you produce for free and monetizing it. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: 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.to and one of the cool things, I just started blogging and 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 from my blog post and you can point it to your own platform. So I'm just curious to see Morad, what's your experiences or thoughts on content ownership?

MORAD_STERN: 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 talking legally, the things that you publish are mostly on your content. This is something that you write. And again, I'm not super familiar with 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. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: 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 might be definitely worthwhile to 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. 

MORAD_STERN: Yeah. And you know what? There's even one thing that no one can take from you and that's the skills that you develop during the process. I can tell you, um, on my free time when I have some, I like, uh, managing my telegram channel. I have a channel on telegram. It almost has 2000 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 learned. 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 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 for 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 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 and 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 it? 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 hard skills, we always own the learning path. The more 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. 

 

STEVE_EDWARDS: So we're getting close to the end of our time here. So before we move to picks, is there anything else we're missing? You want to cover real quick, Morad, or anybody else? 

MORAD_STERN: 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 in promoting, I think it was Hour of the Code or Hour of Code, it was an initiative of teaching kids to code. And in that video, he was addressing kids and teenagers and he asked them to be in the state 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 I think a point that I I really like. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: 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. 

 

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