Invest in IT as a career has advantages compared with other traditional ones: it’s one of the most well-paid profession in a short period, you can work from home in several cases, your knowledge is universal which means that you have more mobility to work in different places in the world.
But with these advantages comes the competition which requires us to not excel not only in our technical skills but, we need something more to stand you from the crown.
But how can I stand from the crowd?
Investing in your personal branding and soft skills.
As soon as you get into It you going to realise that a lot of good professionals lack socials skills, having problems explaining their point of view, don’t know how to work in groups, shyness and so on.
Investing time to leverage your name as a developer will make you stand out from the crown because you build credibility, gains confidence, become trustable and create connection easily. In the process, you will leverage your soft skills.
Your resume can put you in an interview, and then they will analyse what type of professional you are, how is your language skills (in the case of an abroad job), how you manage to explain things, how confident you are with the skills that you write on your resume.
At that moment they are evaluating not only your technical skills but what kind of professional you are. One bad interview and is very difficult to change their point of view about you.
That why is important to take ownership of your personal branding, because you will set up the outcome of that beforehand you meet someone. You take ownership of the search results about your name, your goals, achievements and so on.
This is especially important if you don’t have any experience.
But I’m not entrepreneur, I don’t have time for that!
Yes, you do! In this post, I’ll show a way to, at least, bootstrap the process of formating your brand in a quick, free, simple way by creating a personal webpage that you can hook people in and showcase your work at the same time, show that you are able to play with Git and a few webs basic technologies.
Github pages.
Github is a versioning tool created in 2007 and gained a lot of traction from the open-source community and up to these days is the most used distributed version control framework.
In 2008 started to offer Github Pages, which basically takes a git repository, integrated with Github continuous pipeline, host as a subdomain of github.io domain and create a webpage from your code.
This pipeline, integration, deploying and hosting is transparent to the end-user, the only thing that the user needs to is to host a project and push the code to it.
I don’t recommend you move your whole blog or online store to Github pages because there are limitations to it.
First of all dynamic pages that use server-side languages like PHP, Ruby or Python are not supported. You can use almost any Typescript based page like Angular and React and will work just fine.
Another limitation is, the whole content of the repository cannot exceed 1 GB.
Setting up
The last thing that is necessary to create your first webpage is a website is the website code itself, and this is when templates come into place.
There are several free HTML templates available online, websites like html5up, free-CSS or Templatemo. You can just download it and use it, just make sure to give the proper credits to the creator.
You also need a text editor, I recommend Visual Studio Code with the extension Live Server by Ritwick Dey.
Step by step
Download the template you chose, and unzip it. Open in Visual Studio Code, look for index.html, right-click anywhere and open the live server.
This will open a new browser tab and will automatically show on the page any changes that you have done in your code.
Identify parts of the part of the template that you want to change and try it out.
On your Github account, create a new repository and name it the same name as your account followed by “.github.io”, it’s important that your repository name must be [your username].github.io otherwise the GitHub pipeline will not recognize as Github pages and will not be hosted.
Once the repository is created, drag and drop the files of the template that you edited if you are not used to git in the command line.
It’s important to import the folder with the index.html file at the root folder because the pipeline will look for that when it’s mounting and hosting the website.
If everything goes well you now can go to http://[you username].github.io. and your webpage will pop up.
That’s It, It’s done.
Now you can share this link anywhere and will be sure that will be available.
This is a normal repository, so I strongly recommend upgrading this repository overtime to looks better and add any new projects or an important update.
I hope that this a small tutorial can inspire you to take the first step, and create your own website.