Unusual Personal Branding

I like personal branding and use a lot of branded items. Besides my obvious Code Cop business cards, I use "Code Cop approved" buttons and stickers as giveaways. I wear my Code Cop shorts and hoodies when meeting new clients and when speaking at conferences. I enjoy keeping track of my reading progress using my Code Cop hand crafted book marks. What else could there be? After the embroidery prototype I was looking for something new to add to my branding toolbox.

Branding Iron
I have no memory of how I ended up with the idea, but I got a Code Cop branding iron. No I do not own any cattle or sheep which I need to mark, but at least "branding iron", gives a new meaning to "developer branding". My branding iron, see its picture on the right, needs to be plugged into electricity to warm up and after ten minutes it is ready. I have no idea how I will use it professionally - I am not selling anything in wood crates that could be marked - but I have a lot of fun marking everything in the house: For example, all my Escrima sticks and tool handles are clearly Code Cop's now.


Medallion
Later, after watching Netflix' The Witcher, I toyed with the idea of a Code Cop medallion, like Geralt is wearing. The Witcher's medallion is pretty large and has a raised and relief design, which means part of the silver wolf's head has a 3D effect. I searched online shops for some month for custom pendants. Most places offer two dimensional ones, using vector graphics to drive the cutting or engraving machine. I tested one such design with a simple pattern. The pendant was fine but it was too thin and flat for me. That was not what I had envisioned.

Eventually I found Lucas from Valeria Custom Jewellery who offered similar custom pendants. He 3D printed a mold and casted silver to create the three dimensional form on top of a large medallion. He sent me several work in progress images to check. During the whole process the cost went over the top, as I wanted a certain (too) large size, then shipping and tax for goods from overseas added on top. The total cost makes me wary to wear it. Further my wife keeps reminding me that I am not a rapper with their oversized and lavish jewellery ;-) While I am not wearing it, my Code Cop medallion is my most favourite branded item, sitting on my work desk right in front of me.


To make my medallion more "magic" like Geralt's one, I fancy some engraving at its flat, smooth back. Maybe some piece of source code that is of general significance? Which code would that be? Surely code like the Apollo-11 guidance system or the first Linux kernel are relevant. There are some collections like Computer History Museum's source code. Usually these are many pages of assembly. As the medallion is small compared to that, the code would have to be really short, a few statements at most. Maybe I will go with Greg Walsh's famous Fast Inverse Square Root calculation from Quake III source code: 0x5f3759df.

Code Cop Embroidery

Some time ago fellow software developer Andre Fedorenko got himself an embroidery machine as hobby project. He had a lot of fun with it and played around with different materials, yarns and designs. When he showed off one of his new designs, I joked that he should create a Code Cop for me. And so he did. Small embroidery often comes as patch or badge. The photo on the right shows a classic take on the Code Cop logo. Now I just need a grand short to wear this with dignity.

By using an embroidery machine, the problem is not the actual stitching, but the programming of the machine, i.e. digitising the image. Andre explained that when digitising for embroidery one has to consider how the thread is going, e.g. for the left bar of the C the thread is horizontal whereas for the top of the C it has to be vertical. I would say that he did a great job, the accuracy and detail of the badge is amazing.

And then, when we met the next time, he surprised me again by saying "hey, you forgot your bag" ... and passing me a long cotton bag featuring a larger embroidery of my logo.

How awesome is that! Thank you so much Andre.

Code Cop Knit Doll

Sometimes I present books to individual developers. On one side I am thanking them for "listening" to me - that is the good collaboration and supporting me - and on the other side I want to push them more into reading mandatory books. In preparation for Christmas I gave away a few pieces of Bad Tests, Good Tests by my friend Tomek Kaczanowski. Now imagine how surprised I was when Corinna repayed me with a Code Cop knit doll:

This is amazing. I love the number of detail she put on it:

• I am obviously a cop with both gun (on my right side) and handcuffs (on my left side). The doll is also showing my age, especially the wild hair, grey beard and round belly. ;-)
• There is the Ruby Logo on my police cap and chest. I did not know how much I evangelise the use of Ruby. It is true, Ruby is my favourite programming languages, although I am not using it that often any more.
• I am going nowhere without my own keyboard, so there has to be a Das Keyboard in front of me at all times.
• One of my mantras in trainings is to "Refactor Mercilessly". It seems I am using that one a lot.

Merry Xmas Everybody!

Advanced Personal Branding

This February I wrote three articles on personal branding for software developers. I discussed creating and strengthening your brand step by step: branding all your accounts and defining your motto, sharing and promoting yourself and maintaining a technical blog. I sorted these activities by difficulty into a kind of personal branding ladder, which will vary for different people depending on their personality. This is the final article covering advanced, that are more difficult and more time consuming branding activities.

Go Out!
Personal branding is - well - personal. So you need to meet people in person, interact with them. Find your local user groups or technology related meetups and attend regularly. Join the discussion and talk about the topics you are interested in. You do not need to present anything formally. Regular listeners who ask questions now and then are vital for the existence of any community. There is no way you can fail here. As long as you are authentic, people who share your enthusiasm will want to meet you and discuss your topics. You are interesting to like-minded developers, you just need to allow them to find you.

Present at a User Group
After attending the user group meetings regularly, it is time to take the next step and present something yourself. It it true that some people would rather face death than talk in front of a crowd, but the usual audience at community meetings is forgiving. Remember, most people in the audience are like you and already know you in person. They gave similar beginner talks or know that they should. First time speakers cannot be expected to give flawless talks, and that is the beauty of user groups, full of natural human beings, delivering refreshing and idiosyncratic presentations. Some communities are so successful in encouraging their members to talk, that they continuously breed world class speakers.

Nevertheless I am not saying that your talk does not need rigorous preparation and practice up front. There are several basic things that you can screw up in presentations in general, like giving a wall of text or death by power point. Do your research and read some articles on preparing content, creating slides, presentation techniques and such. There is also much content available on technical presentations in particular. In fact there is only one rule you need to keep in mind: Your presentation is not about you. It is not about you becoming a rock star speaker, it is about serving the audience. For example if you want the audience to read your code samples, make them easy to understand and write them in a large enough font. If the font is too small you are actually conveying the message that you do not care if people read it.

I gave my first presentation at the local Java user group five years ago. It worked out well and today, many presentations later, I still like to talk to smaller groups because these presentations often become conversations and large crowds make me nervous. If you have an extrovert character and like talking to people, giving regular presentations could be less cumbersome than maintaining a technical blog. Here you might change the order of steps. Anyway you need to do both!

Organise a User Group
Organising a local community is hard work. Meetings have to be scheduled, speakers contacted and so on. Usually the group leaders' work is not seen but vital for a thriving community. Step up and help the organisers, your help will be appreciated. Or maybe there is no local community for your favourite topic, then it is high time to create one. Creating new communities is easy using tools like Meetup or social media platforms. For example Aaron Cruz is a "community factory". Be created a new meetup for a topic that clearly has been missing, Clojure Vienna and organised a few meetups, which were a great success. Then he transferred the ownership of the group to the most enthusiastic member and went on to create another meetup.

Your group does not have to be local, there are good examples of virtual communities as well. For example Jonny Andersson runs a remote reading group, a small group of people sharing the interest to learn from books. Another, quite different example is the vJUG, the on-line Java User Group, which brings well known speakers on-line every month.

As I said above, being a community leader can be a lot of work. For example Peter Brachwitz of Clojure Vienna told me that he prepares a presentation if nobody else volunteers to do so. Now that is great leader spirit! Despite the effort, running an user group is a highly rewarding activity. You will be able to watch great presentations (if you organise them ;-) and have "exclusive" access to speakers and other community leaders. For example in the Java world there is an International JUG Leader's conference once a year.

Present at a Conference
Presenting at user groups is often informal, sometimes becoming a discussion rather than a polished presentation. The larger the audience gets, the more formal and professional your presentation needs to be. When submitting a talk to a large and well known conferences like Devoxx, you are competing with many other speakers to get accepted. Also your future talk needs much more practice. When facing 80 or 100 people for the first time, who are all looking at you in eager anticipation, your brain is likely to shut down, unless you are naturally gifted. At least mine did, and I did not even talk to really large crowds till now.

So your presentation needs more preparations, several dry runs, maybe even showing it to a colleague for feedback. This is much work, which keeps me from doing it too often, if at all. And I do not believe in talks with little or no preparation. Even if you do not mind making a fool of yourself, you are doing your audience a disservice. You are wasting their precious (and limited) learning time, when instead they could listen to great talks in parallel tracks.

At international events you might meet new people and grow your network beyond your local area. While this is already true for all attendees, the "magic" speaker badge lets you stand out. Other speakers will talk to you and regular attendees will stalk you to ask questions ;-) And speaking at international conferences can make you famous, really world-famous if you work hard. Working hard means attending at least one conference each month, all around the globe, besides your regular work. This is really tough, as veteran speakers like Dan North or Thomas Sundberg have assured me.

Organise a Conference
Did you spot the pattern? Find some event, attend, contribute and finally organise one yourself. What is true for local events is even more true for conferences. Again you can start small with local one-day conferences embedded in larger communities like Eclipse DemoCamp, Google DevFest or Code Retreat. Your event is likely relying on the infrastructure and help of a well running user group, because you cannot do everything by yourself. For example when we started Eclipse DemoCamp in Vienna five years ago, we did so with the help of the Java User Group Austria.

A much better example is GeeCON, my favourite Java conference which I attend every year. I believe its story is the following: Some guys of the Polish JUG met and complained about the lack of a great conference in Poland. They decided to create one. Already the first version of GeeCON was a huge success and over the years the conference became one of most awesome events I have ever attended. But GeeCON is also a perfect example of the hard work needed to run such an event. If the organisers are not in a hurry, e.g. to buy more wireless routers or fix some other problem, they are walking around the venue slowly, with tired, dark circled eyes. Lukasz Stachowiak, member of the GeeCON organisers, once told me that preparations for the next version of GeeCON start on the very next day after the previous one has ended. I am sure this is also true for Devoxx and all community-driven conferences.

Write a Technical Book
Finally we reach the top of the food chain. Writing a book is probably the most time consuming activity. Tomek Kaczanowski told me that it took him two years to get his Practical Unit Testing book delivered. But the time was well spent. His book is getting more and more popular, which is nice in case of the little revenue each book gives, but much more important is the widespread reception of his book.

As I did not write any books myself, I can only refer to articles about doing so. For example Jack Shirazi's discussion if writing a technical book is worthwhile covers income vs. non-direct income vs. time spent of writing a book. It says "People are impressed by authors. If you have had a book published in a certain area, even if that book did not do particularly well, people are impressed." Since 2007 when he wrote the article, things have changed in publishing if you decide to self publish, as Tomek did. Jurgen Appelo recommends to read at least three books about self publishing before starting with it. And if you think about writing a book you should read Rand's excellent explanation how to write a book first.

It seems that writing a book is sort of making addicted. Many authors I know did write more than one book or at least think about writing another one, even if it would make their wives unhappy (again). Tomek decided to give his third book away for free. Bad Tests, Good Tests is a short book, nevertheless it took him some time to write it. Sure, giving the book away for free removes its direct income aspect, but increases its non-direct income, as more people will get it. Anyway, free or not, it is a great book and you should read it!

Thanks to all the people I used in this blog post as examples for successful branding activities, especially as I did not ask for their permission to do so.

Write about what you do

This is the third part of my series about personal branding. It started with some advice for a friend but the content kept growing and growing. This is supposed to be a step by step guide for software developers to build their own personal brand. The first steps are branding all accounts and defining a motto. The next steps to get some reputation are sharing content using Twitter and contributing to Stack Overflow. Now it is time to talk about writing.

Maintain a Technical Blog
Blogging is a huge area and many things have been written about it. I am no social media expert nor a professional blogger so I recommend you first do some research about how to write blog posts. Start with Scott Hanselman's excellent article how to Keep Your Blog from Sucking. And yes, I feel badly promising information about blogging and then sending you STFW. Instead I will only comment on a few rules you will find.

Blogging Frequency
I have seen advice to create at least eight blog posts a month, or even more, to keep readers engaged and attract new ones as well. But let's face it, blogging is hard work. Even if you are a natural writer you still need to collect the information, maybe add code samples, put it all together and format it nicely. This takes time and unless you are writing blog posts on company time, you likely do not have that much spare time. Compared to sharing on Twitter, blogging is more heavy-weight and therefore more likely to be postponed. If you are disciplined you could set up a time in your weekly schedule to work on the next blog post. I am not and I barely manage to write two posts per month. I keep telling myself that a blog posts needs as much time to write as it needs, there is no point in forcing it. I would rather not publish anything than a poorly written or badly formatted post.

Content is King
Obviously content is king, so what should you write about? If there is something you want to say, just write it. While being authentic, you write mainly for yourself. For example write a rant to get over something that made you angry. (But blog rants should not be most of your writing.) Next write for your readers and for search engines. Dan North once said: "If you did something and it worked, then write about it. If it did not work, write about it as well, you never know how other people will use it." Following this advice creates the most useful articles which share insight or teach new skills. Especially how-to posts are helpful to people and get a lot of traffic from search engines.

Some other things you could write about are recaps of conferences or events, reviews of books or a little fun post from time to time. A great source for blog content is your mailbox. Some of your email-conversations do not need to be private and might be useful for other people as well. In such a case just write a blog post. Even if you need to write the email, you can always reuse the content and put it on your blog, too. I used this technique while working for a past employer. Whenever I wrote some technical email or wiki page, I considered reusing the content on my blog. For example here is an email I wrote to the whole team some time ago. Companies like IBM even encourage you to cross post internal content to your public blog, but you really need to be careful about sharing internal information.

Size Does Matter
More content is not always better. I got feedback from one of my readers that he likes my posts because they are short and he is able to read them quickly. Although I do not mind longer articles myself, I do not read them immediately when checking my feeds. They stay in the list of articles to read, but this list is ever growing and there is a probability that I might never read them at all. So a total of 500 words seems to be a reasonable size for a blog post. 500 words equal 3500 to 4500 characters, which is exactly the average size of my blog posts and this one is at this very sentence crossing the boundary.

Focus on Quality
As while sharing, while writing never focus on the number of followers. There are plenty of articles in the web promising you to attract many followers. Do not waste your time with these. Instead care for the quality of your blog, e.g. come back to update your blog in case of mistakes. Also focus on the overall interaction. Answer comments timely and follow up on questions.

Write a Technical Article
If you enjoy writing, you could consider writing full blown articles for technical magazines or developer portals. These reach a different audience and are more reputable because they are real publications considered in an academic sense. But they are also much harder to create. First your topic needs to fit the current theme of the magazine. Not all ideas are welcome, if the editor thinks your topic is not of interest to many readers, your proposal will be rejected. On the other hand, on your blog you can publish whatever you like. So given your area of specialisation or interest, finding a publisher might be difficult. Publishers have strict guidelines for the content and (the ones I worked with) expect at least 2500 words per article, so five times more work than a regular blog post. You might have to revise your article several times until it is accepted. The articles I wrote some years ago took me between 20 and 30 hours each to get them published.

That ends my description of the basic steps you should take to build your own personal brand. There are some more advanced topics you could do, e.g. public speaking, but I will leave them for another time.

Gain Reputation by Sharing

In the previous article I talked about the foundation of your personal brand, your reputation. Reputation means to be recognized for something, at least by your peers. But to be known for something you actually have to do something, e.g. create or share things of interest.

So Just Start Sharing
The easiest way to share is to re-share. Start using Twitter and follow some people related to your interests. These may be authors of books you consider important or well known members of the community or just people you know and want to listen to. If they share something you consider worth reading, then re-share (re-tweet) it. Also share links whenever you find an interesting article or useful tool. There exists a bookmark widget that makes sharing to Twitter very easy. If you do all that then I am already interested in your Twitter stream because you aggregate information about a certain topic and reduce noise.

Do Not Over-share
Start slowly and do not over-share. Be sensitive about what you share. For example political or religious topics might be controversial and will not help you - unless that is what you want to be known for. I especially like the rules given by Martin Nielsen: "Would your (hypothetical) grandchildren be proud of what you share? If not then probably you should not share it. And if you do not smile while writing it, you should not share it at all." I have violated these rules myself a few times as you can see in my blog rants, but exceptions prove the rule. ;-)

Promote Yourself
Many social media tools, like Twitter, Facebook or Google+ allow you to promote content by sharing links or snippets of text. Using these tools you can and should promote yourself and tell the world what you are doing to build your own brand. But if all your content is (self)-marketing it will not work. People will lose interest because there is no benefit in following you. While working for IBM I had the opportunity to listen to a presentation by Luis Suarez, the email-less man, about social media and he advised that eight out of ten messages should not be (self)-marketing, but interesting and useful information.

Engage Others and Communicate
After some time, when you feel comfortable with sharing interesting things via social media tools, it is time to communicate directly with others. This can be a simple as answering tweets or commenting on blog posts you read. Saying thanks or asking questions is a great way to start a conversation. This is exactly how I got in touch with the great people organizing my most favourite conference. While preparing to visit GeeCON I shared some ideas for the community day on the GeeCON blog. It was not a big thing, just one or two sentences. Then during the conference, when I passed Adam of the GeeCON staff, he stopped and we had a nice chat. He had recognized the Code Cop logo on the sleeve of my T-shirt. (By the way, GeeCON 2014 is coming up and they have great speakers announced, so you might consider going there.)

Be Authentic (Again)
I already mentioned in the first part that you need to be authentic. If you have nothing to say then do not try to make up fake conversations. If you read a blog post and do not have anything to add or discuss, then just leave it alone. I rarely add comments to blog posts. If I have nothing to say, I just shut up.

Create Genuine Content
After sharing and commenting the next step is creating stuff on your own, which usually means maintaining a programmer blog. While this is true I recommend something easier to start: Stack Overflow. I am sure that you use Stack Overflow. So why not register an account and start contributing? Even if you are just reading answers, you should vote on questions and answers that are useful to you. Then you could make a habit of fixing badly formatted questions and (given some reputation) adding tags. Sooner or later you will have some reasonable question to ask or even know some answers to existing questions. Stack Overflow is an excellent training area for future writers because questions and answers should be correct, concise and properly formatted, just like your blog posts, only much shorter. See a recent presentation by Jeff Atwood about how to be a good Stack Overflow citizen for details on how to work best with Stack Overflow.

The next part will be on maintaining a technical blog. While I am busy writing about it, I expect a lot of interesting material to appear in your Twitter stream.

Personal Branding for Developers

Recently a friend mentioned that by creating the Code Cop I built a strong brand. I was surprised. Surly I spent a lot of energy on my personal branding, but I had not considered it a brand, probably because there was never any business involved. We talked about some interesting ideas that he will work on in the future and asked me how to build a brand. This article is mainly for him. It might be interesting for others as well so I decided to publish it rather than create a long email. I will describe what I did to create my brand together with some things that I picked up on the way.

You are a brand
My journey for personal branding started when I read an article by Jeff Atwood, Your Personal Brand. But even back then I already had my brand which I had been awarded by my co-workers. It was "revealed" to me, I did not look for it. This is the most important point regarding your personal brand: You do not have a brand but you are a brand. You are not Coca-Cola, probably you are not even a company, just a developer. Personal branding is not about creating a fake perception of yourself, choosing a fancy title or bragging about your deeds. It is about honesty and focusing on being a great person. It is the mental image people have about you. If you are not authentic whatever you do will be shit!

Understand Reputation
Your personal brand is supported by your reputation. Reputation is the opinion people have about you. For knowledge workers it is related to how much you know and how much you help others as well as general social "metrics" like how you behave or if people trust you. Everything you do gives a perception of your brand. Every small interaction in the real or digital world builds or breaks your reputation and therefore strengthens or weakens your brand. Be serious but do not be too serious.

Brand Your Accounts
Today most of our communication is digital. The first step is to show yourself. Choose a good portrait of you or maybe an unique avatar and put it on your GitHub account. You have a GitHub account, don't you ;-) Seriously, put it on all your accounts. Same goes for name and motto. If you are not sure about the motto, leave it blank for now, but you are sure about your name, right ;-) When registering new accounts try to use the same user name that fits you or your main idea of your brand. Obviously that is not always possible unless you are a very early adopter like Rands in his virtual land grab for his user name. Still I try my standard list of user names, e.g. codecop, codecopkofler or my name until I hit something that is still available. The user name is not that important while the display name shows your name in a similar way. Note that some services like Twitter allow changing the user name without problems. By branding all your accounts in a similar way people will recognize you across application and social media boundaries.

I am not sure how anonymous accounts fit in because they are not linked to you personally. But used consistently I assume using a pseudonym for your name consistently will have the same effect. When getting famous you might need to keep up the masquerade and actually dress up like your profile picture. There are people successfully working under an obviously fake name, talking in public and still staying anonymous.

Define Your Motto
I briefly touched the issue of your motto. Your brand needs a motto and there is plenty opportunity to show it as most accounts offer a biography or about-me field. For example Twitter offers you 140 characters to describe yourself. While this may seem way too little space to explain your passion, idea or project, it is an excellent opportunity to focus your brand, prune it to its essential core, the motto. This pruning may take some time and it is not easy to come up with a succinct, yet powerful description of yourself. I started with a long story about me, like the one you can read here, then pruned and compressed it further and further until I got something I liked. In the end my shortest bio was 142 characters long. As additional benefit I ended with a set of bios, different in size, and I am able to choose one depending on the space that is available in my profile.

Working on your motto should get you started. There is much more I want to explain, but writing about it took more time than I had initially expected. I will publish this first part now, so you can read it while I continue writing about how to gain reputation by sharing content.

Code Cop Kofler

Summer began last month in Austria and I went abroad and got myself a lovely souvenir: a carved wooden desk name plate. I was not sure what to write there and thought about my twitter name but did not trust the artificer to cope with the @-sign and ended with some kind of hybrid name:


In hindsight I was clever not to ask for something complicated because the guy messed it up twofold and did not even get the letters of my name right. Nevertheless it is an icon of my office and I love it. If only I had a desk to put it on.

Code Cop goes Blue

It has been six months since I went "blue". After having some minor problems in the beginning I have settled down. Recently I completed the second learning plan on how to become a true IBMer, so I feel like changing my Code Cop character a little ;-)

Awesome Book Marks

Since the beginning of code-cop.org I have put strong emphasis on my personal branding. Till now I have created various t-shirts, business cards and buttons. I use these buttons to award conference speakers who delivered good presentations and to thank contributors who helped during Hackergarten. But now my mother-in-law excelled all of them. See my new hand embroidered book marks:


These are some awesome masterpieces! Thank you Lidia.

T-shirts, T-shirts, T-shirts

My Personal Branding
Here it is - finally - the official Code Cop T-shirt. In fact it's not just a shirt, but a whole series of variations: There is a black on blue version that has proper contrast and one with a navy-coloured logo which is a bit more discreet.


My favourite one is the cosy version of the blue 'Code Cop' shirt. The large logo on the front and the URL on the back are produced using Flock Print. There is a female version - I just don't know when to stop! They all look great and I had each of them produced and sent to me to inspect.


More Freaky
Who needs such T-shirts? Well, geeks need cool shirts and Jeff has one, too. If you like freaky shirts as much as I do, then you will probably love my coding related quotes shirts. I like to use (more or less) ingenious quotes to bother my colleagues with either small advice or mild criticism. One of my favourite quotes for crappy but fast developed code is Uncle Bob's "rushingtogetawholebunchofshitcodedandsortofrunning". Wearing this shirt you don't even have to say it out loud. ;-)


Talking of coding: What's your favourite design pattern? Mine is the Singleton pattern. No, I'm joking, I hate it. Alex Miller hates it too and explained some time ago why it's so hateful. (At my previous working place one third of all classes was dependant on singletons. It was awful.) I can't stand them. I'm getting sick when I see one. Therefore I'm sure that Singletons Are Evil.


(Buy Code Cop shirts)