An Experience

The final day of the intensive 5-day Hashnode Bootcamp proved to be a goldmine of valuable insights and learning. Saturday, October 7, 2023 encompassed sessions on a diverse range of tech topics, offering attendees deep dives into various aspects of technology and development. The day commenced with Yuri Santana's lecture on Growing Your Online Presence, providing guidance on utilizing social media for personal branding. This was followed by Alex Schachne's workshop on constructing an AI Headshots application with Leap AI. Ayodele Samuel Adebayo then offered tips on marketing yourself as a developer, and the day concluded with Chris Bell's engaging talk on leveraging Knock for multi-channel notifications and strategies. With its wealth of informative sessions, the culmination of the Hashnode Bootcamp was truly an enriching experience.

Takeaway from Yuri Santana's lecture:

Her lecture was on growing online presence.

Online presence can be defined as the digital footprint of all the activity and content that a person has under their name or brand on the internet.

1. Your Brand: To create your online presence, you will need a brand. By brand, it does not mean you need to hire a marketing firm or anything. Our online presence is the brand we are talking about here.

2. Finding a Niche: To grow your online presence, the most important thing is to find a niche in which you plan to have your presence.

   1. Your niche should be what you have knowledge about or a topic that aligns with your interest, considering you are working on that interest to gain knowledge consistently.

3. Benefits of having a niche:

   1. Will help you establish yourself as a reliable source.

   2. This will minimize the risk of trying to reach everyone since now you will have specific communities to take part in.

   3. Get discovered by companies that are looking for talent in that niche.

   4. Better rate for you to make content that will help the community.

4. Which Platform: It does not matter as long as you know the ins and outs of the platform you are using. But make sure that you can communicate with your community freely on the platform.

5. Do numbers matter? No. Everyone started with 0 followers; what matters is your input to the community.

6. Growing: Once you find your niche and choose the platform of your choice, it is your time to grow. The things you need to grow are as follows:

   1. Consistency: Post and communicate with your community consistently.

   2. Honesty: At the end of the day, it is the internet. If you lie or steal content from someone, people will find it out. So the best thing to do is to be transparent and give credit where it is due.

   3. Connection: Connect with other creators and aim to build a relationship instead of just a following.

7. Connecting with other creators:

   1. Specify your motive; it will be helpful to both of you.

   2. Interact with their content.

   3. Aim to build a relationship that will last.

   4. Try to reach out where they are most active.

   5. Respect their privacy.

8. Last but not least, avoid the empty "Hii".
   A good example: "First of all Kudos for the work you are doing as a developer advocate and I am kind of inspired by your profile as well. I am looking forward to connecting with more developer advocates and learning from them."

Takeaway from Alex Schachne's workshop:

Since it was a demo workshop, there were not many takeaways.

The GitHub repo: https://github.com/leap-ai/headshots-starter/tree/main

1. Leap lets you build powerful AI workflows in minutes that scale to millions. Generate AI images, music, and finetune models directly in our dashboard, or you can add these features to your app with best-in-class APIs and SDKs.

2. The demo we went over is their Headshot AI repo which is an open-source project from Leap AI that generates professional AI headshots in minutes.

3. Leap AI is very cool, and you should try it.

4. Leap has a lot of great resources on GitHub to help you get started.

5. Leap provides a free trial with which you can generate 100 images for free. Also, if you contact Alex directly, he might be able to provide you with a coupon to try their starting plan for a month free.

Takeaway from Ayodele Samuel Adebayo's lecture:

Ayodele is also popularly known by his pseudo-name, unclebigbay. He is a software developer and a customer service engineer at Hashnode. His lecture was on selling yourself as a developer.

1. Definition of selling yourself: Showcasing your strength, skills, experience, and personality positively and genuinely. It is mainly done through "Personal branding".

2. Pre-requisite:

   1. Identify what you aim to be known for.

   2. Have a goal.

3. Importance of Personal Branding: Personal branding helps you stand out, build credibility and trust, expand opportunities, control your reputation, connect with others in your field, and differentiate yourself from the competition. A strong personal brand makes you more visible, memorable, and distinguished in your industry.

4. Showcasing your skills:

   1. Build as many projects as you can so that you are confident in your skills and help you learn the skill practically.

   2. Built it in public, I have written the takeaway from Day 4 of Hashndoe Bootcamp in this article called Structure where Tim Okonkwo gave a whole lecture on this topic. In summary, building in public will make you more transparent and consistent.

   3. Documenting your journey: Regularly sharing your learning journey can serve as a valuable resource that helps you reduce the need for unnecessary interviews in the future.

5. Last but not least don't forget to stay hydrated.

Takeaway from Chris Bell's overview of Knock:

Chris is the founder of Knock, in this overview, he showed us how we can use Knock to make our lives easier.

Github repo: knocklabs/in-app-notifications-example-nextjs: In-app notifications example app, written using NextJS (github.com)

1. Knock is a flexible, reliable notifications infrastructure that's built to scale with you. Use our APIs to engage users, power cross-channel workflows, and manage notification preferences.

2. Get 10K notifications per month for free with their free plan.

3. With Knock, you can send out notifications across email, SMS, discord, slack, etc. all with their API.

4. During this session, Chris went through the repo mentioned above to show us how we can use knock practically.

5. Knock provides some templates to get you started. You have the option to customize everything and add your own logic. The following picture is an example of a template for a user to get a notification.

   

   1. Some benefits of using Knock (I am only adding my favorite benefits here):

      1. Per-user notification preference.

      2. Timezone-aware

      3. i18n support for translating notifications.

      4. Prebuilt template and CLI to work with.

   2. Last but not least, you can contact Chris for price negotiation if you are an early startup.

The final day of Hashnode's intensive 5-day Bootcamp culminated in an enriching learning experience. From growing an online presence and marketing yourself as a developer to leveraging AI and notifications infrastructure, the sessions covered a wide range of valuable tech skills and strategies.

With takeaways on establishing a personal brand, building in public, connecting with one's community, and utilizing tools like Leap AI and Knock, attendees came away with actionable insights to aid their development journey.

The diversity of topics explored underscored the multitude of components involved in succeeding as a modern developer. Overall, the culminating day of the Bootcamp delivered a wealth of knowledge to equip attendees for the road ahead.

Last but not least thanks a lot Daniela Passos for hosting it and always keeping us engaged. I look forward to the next Hashnode Bootcamp.

Happy Hacking !!!