Your personal brand in DevRel

Alison Dowdney: So a little bit about me. My name is Allison. Allison Downey. That's my Twitter handle right there. I'm a co I'm a co chair of Kubernetes special interest group contributor experience.

So contribute experience. And I'm a CNCF ambassador. I'm currently at the moment, I've just taken a little little break. I'm just chilling. So yeah.

With that out of the way, here's a brief list of what I'll be covering. Yeah. I I would read them. We'll we'll, yeah, we'll we'll go over it as we go. So what is a personal brand, first up?

So defining brand, I went on to Google search and I was I was like, define brand. And there's a lot of definitions here, but this is the most relevant one to what we're talking about here. And it's a particular identity or image regarded as an asset. So when we bring that into the context of personal brand. So personal brand is your own identity, your image.

It's it's your own asset. It's who you are. So why this matters. So personal brand matters in a lot of context. I've got two points here, but to talk to them, you know, it helps kind of define the vision that you're trying to go out and achieve when it comes to creating your blogs, creating your talks, and all that.

And the next point, people remember people. Because it's often, you know, we can get very engrossed in technology. But to kind of make a a good lasting impact so folks remember you is, like, you know, understanding who the person is behind all this, you know, technology stuff, all the all the things that we're sharing with our audiences. So how do you identify what your personal brand is? So I've got one thing here, which is you can make a vision board.

So a vision board with, you know, pictures, and you can do this in anything. You can do this in a Google Doc, in a slide, in in Notion, in in Paint. Even you could do even do it on, like, paper, but get together pictures of you and your element, like pictures of the hobbies you enjoy, you know, home decor, the things you like. Just kind of, you know, if you tried to picture yourself as a person, like, make a collage of all these things of this is who you are. Right?

And, like, you know, the stuff that, you know, think things people might not know about you, but you'd be so awesome to you'd you'd be so keen to share and talk about. So I've made a, like, a brief kind of vision board here of things that I enjoy, you know, kind of I've got soft toys. I've got an arcade machine here. I really like music games. I like, you know, mechanical keyboards.

And I like I like memes. I'm going to McDonald. You want anything? Anime. Cute stuff.

And from this, you can kinda get a general vibe of kind of the person I am beyond the tech. Right? And yeah. So what we can do with that. Right?

Now you've kind of seen all that. You can kind of slightly incorporate that into the the content that you might be making, whether it be blogs, videos, talks, presentations. You might notice that, like, my whole slide theme here is very kind of soft pastel colors and all that. And yeah. And so now let's take a break.

Let's take a break from ourselves and think about the wider wider community. So you're not the only one, is a kind of big point here. So the communities that you're part of are doing awesome things. You know, they're part of, like, whether it be technical, nontechnical, like, you know, it's a part of your personal brand to some extent. So that that association people make, like, with you and being confident with, like, whatever the technology area you're kind of, you know, competent in.

So for me, it's people see me as part of the Kubernetes community. They see they kind of associate, like, the CNCF with me being a CNCF ambassador. Right? And it doesn't matter where you are in your career, how skilled or, like, you know, whether you're a beginner or you're kind of deeply, like, you know, technical expertise and all that. It doesn't matter where you're at.

That association exists. As long as you're kind of in that space, you know, that is part of your brand. So how do you build your presence in a community with that, you know, that that in mind with, you know, your brand being associated with technical domain and all that? Well, you participate, and you can participate through sharing your experiences and knowledge. So a lot of us do this already.

We like to in DevRel, in DevRel, we we like like to learn in public and, you know, show people awesome tech and all sorts of things, you know. But this alone isn't enough, I think, which brings me to my next kind of point, which brings me to my next point here, which is giving back. Offering to help others participating in open source and technical communities, whether it be, you know, someone stuck on some problem and they're asking in the Slack for help, you know. People people remember acts of kindness. People remember, you know, that you went out and helped them.

Right? And the great part about that is, you know, folks talk and they remember you, and when they see that you're doing awesome stuff in these communities, they wanna share that with others. And endorsing others, share on your social media channels, contents, talks, blogs, videos from other folks that you enjoyed. People remember kind words, and they're willing they peep people wanna pay it forward. So, you know, you might share a good good word about an a talk that you really enjoyed and, you know, that person who did that talk, they're gonna be like, yo.

Thank you very much. Like and and they're going to share, like, content of yours. They're gonna remember you, and they might see a talk of yours. And they'll be like, yo, I thought this person's talk was really awesome. Now, which brings me to this last kind of summary point here, which which is the more you participate, the more you will build your brand.

Right? And now some final thoughts. It takes time. So, you know, you might take some of the things here away from this presentation and put them into practice. And, you know, you're not gonna instantly see skyrocketing, growth or success in the areas you want, but you'll see gradual process.

And your brand will evolve over time. You're not just stuck to the one thing. Right? You know, I'm here right now and I really enjoy soft toys and playing arcade games and all that, and that's me personally. But who knows?

Two two years from now, I might be really into kite surfing and cool leather jackets. Progress is gradual. Now that comes back to that point that I made two slides ago, which is, yay, you're not gonna instantly see, growth, you know. Things are gonna take time, but what matters is that you're taking kind of small incremental steps and things are getting growing over time.