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Comment by zackzackzack | Hacker News Reader

"Coderwall is a striking modern profile for developers. Standout and be recognized for the awesome things you're learning and building."-From their website.

Throwing this out there: awesome developers could and probably should be able to make anything that coderwall could offer in terms of awesome profiles. IMO the best way to stand out is to build your own website with some open source stuff, put up your projects, and have a few links to online accounts that you put a lot of effort into making useful. By using coderwall, it looks like a developer would be only gaining access to people who are too lazy to look through their awesome website.

There is a Mark Twain quote that is escaping me that would really apply here. Something to do with crowds and what to do when everybody else is doing or thinking something.

EDIT: They have a very pretty website though. Kudos for that.

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The best way to stand out is to go and have lunch,dinner,breakfast with people who might need your services. I think it's called networking.

I could care less about being known as the best programmer in the world, I want to be guy people turn to when they have a problem. By the time people realize they need a developer it's so far down the food chain that most of the value has been extracted by people who go to breakfast lunch and dinner with people. People who network create value, people who code create software.

I would love to read a blog post about this.

People who network don't create value. They extract it. Don't confuse the two.

But yes, developers should become better at extracting the value they create.

Absurd absolutism and a false dichotomy. So absurd, in fact, it borders on being diagnostic of the writer of the sentiment. Networking creates value -- for you. That value comes in the form of relationships with the right people.

Not just for you: if your networking makes people hire you and you subsequently add value, then the time invested in networking was an integral part of 'adding value'. If you add more value than someone else would have, it's even a net win for society as a whole.

In other words, get out of programming and go into sales. I've been saying this for a long time.

IMO the best way to stand out is to build your own website

It's difficult to compare a large group of people based on their websites though- you can't exactly tabulate the data. I suspect that's the idea behind Coderwall- that companies will pay to mine data and find prospective employees.

I don't think Coderwall will/is meant to replace individual web sites, though.

Also, building your own website isn't exactly the advice I'd give to, say, someone with 20 years of Java experience but who's never done any work on web stuff.

I don't think comparing developers based off the achievements on Coderwall is helpful either.

Developers aren't necessary web developers.

I've done both sides of the game, but I sure know that my skills at slinging HTML and CSS didn't improve whilst I was deep in backend C code.

Perhaps:

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

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