Using Polywork for content creation as a software engineer
As part of my new year’s resolutions for 2021, I decided that I wanted to create content for other software developers, but as someone who battles with imposter syndrome, it was really hard to convince myself that I had something of value to share.
I enjoy public speaking and it comes more naturally to me than creating other types of content, I had a few posts on Medium written already but I felt incapable of clicking on the publish button until I finally did it. I started to share my posts on social media and I was getting good feedback so my imposter syndrome was getting smaller.
Somewhere along those times, I found out about Polywork on Twitter and managed to get an invite to skip the waiting list, I saw many of the content creators that I follow and admire were using it and I decided to give it a try. Polywork is a social network that lets users create a free personal webpage, share what’re they’re up to both personally and professionally and send collaboration requests to others.
Back in April there wasn’t much going on there but something I really like is how they have been building their product publicly, every now and then you’ll see a tweet of some new feature coming out and I find this very cool.
Since I started using Polywork I’ve managed to create more content, connect with like-minded people and share my wins (and some losses). In this post, I’ll share how I’ve been using it to help me with content creation for other software developers.
Fight that inner saboteur with all the highlights
One of the few things you could do back in April was to post your highlights into the timeline so I took it seriously and started posting what I considered highlights of my life since 2013 (that’s as far as my memory could go so bear with me). I posted everything I considered a highlight from both my professional and personal life, I have posted about my teaching assistant experience at my alma mater, getting my Computer Engineer degree, my first job, the day Dasha came into my life, my volunteering work with JOINCIC, moving countries, my first ever talk, meetup, etc and I was feeling overwhelmed about all the things I had accomplished until today, it felt like I had a whole timeline to show my inner saboteur they were wrong and that I have a lot of meaningful things to share with the world.
This is definitely one of the main things that drove me to start using Polywork more and more and I highly recommend sitting down for a bit and think about your highlights, your wins, even some failures! whatever you think can be useful to tell your story. By doing this you are not only filling up your profile with useful information about yourself but also, it serves you to see in perspective all the amazing things you’ve accomplished, as small as they might be. ✨
In my case, my number one problem for content creation is myself (and time but that’s something for another post 😂). I doubt myself, I always think I have nothing new to share and that it’s not worth me talking about X or Y, so being able to see all my highlights chronologically ordered right in front of me was almost a literal slap to my face saying shut up, you know what you’re talking about and it’s all worth sharing even if it’s been said before you have your own unique way of saying it! 🤩
Connecting your domain to Polywork
This year I also published my personal website, I bought the domain in 2019 and it took me 2 years to do anything with it. I’m not going to lie, I don’t think anyone actually checks my website out, sometimes not even myself. So one thing you can do is point your domain to your polywork profile and use it as a portfolio, they have a quick guide in the settings for you to do it depending on your DNS provider, but because I had already created my site, I wanted to point my profile to a subdomain updates.carlastabile.com. I admit I had some issues connecting my account to GoDaddy but with the help of Ramón we finally did it and as a result, I wrote a simple tutorial in case I ran into this problem again, or for anyone else having the same issue.
Show yourself as open for content creation
Because my main goal was to create more content, I use Polywork to let other users know that I’m open for content creation and mentoring among other things, and surprisingly enough I got a few messages asking for my advice with their CV, or people moving countries so they wanted to know about my own experience. Coming back from a year where networking IRL was impossible, having the opportunity to do so and to help others was really exciting for me.
Explore the Multiverse & the Space Station
Not long ago Polywork launched the Multiverse and the Space Station. One of my favourite parts of the multiverse, (apart from the clear reference to Marvel) is the “what everyone’s doing” section:
In this section, I personally like to filter by the badges Software Engineering, Content Creation and Podcaster to check out what other people are doing and find inspiration for myself, and this is pretty much the purpose of the multiverse. You also have the opportunity to find like-minded people when looking at what they’re creating.
The Space Station is one of the most recent features, taking what I was already looking at in the multiverse into another section, in the space station it’s even easier to find people to collaborate with for content creation (in my case), you can stray away contact them and ask them if they’re open for collaboration with you, or if they can advise you. The space station is very new and I haven’t used it that much yet but I definitely will, also I just found the people open to brainstorming section and I’m already planning to use it soon.😄
Overall my biggest fight to create content is with myself and having a tool that shows me straight away all my wins and helps me to connect with the right people it’s a huge help. I hope this post helped you understand a little more about Polywork and how to use it for your own purpose.
