How to build your personal brand as a Software Engineer

How I built a tech blog/newsletter, created courses/YouTube videos, spoke at conferences/podcasts and mentored others all while working a full time job at fast paced startups and BigTech.

Build a personal brand?

Isn’t that for management, designers and marketing professionals?

Why should you invest in building a personal brand or an online presence? And what could be some meaningful outcomes?

Let’s dive in.

Motivation

I see a few strong reasons:

1. You build a wider professional network which can be leveraged to find your next opportunity, job for yourself and your loved ones or simply to connect with interesting people; In the age of AI coding agents becoming better and companies doing layoffs left right and center, this is a strong moat to build.

2. You learn from others by being open on the internet. Here’s a scenario: You bump into someone at a conference/meetup and they suggest something or ask a curious question that you did not think about earlier. It just may be the spark, that you need to start working on something that could be valuable and meaningful to you.

3. By sharing your knowledge with others; you become better at your own craft and in the process pay it forward to the community grooming the next generation of talent

This creates a virtuous flywheel:

You learn → you share → others connect with you → ask questions → you learn better

I started with small intentional steps back in 2018 and 8 years in, I saw below milestones along the way..

• I acquired 10K organic followers on LinkedIn, leading to a stronger network.

• Built 10K new blog global readership in 2025 itself (Top regions: India, China, US).

• Delivered 7 talks at major events (e.g., AppiumConf, SeleniumConf, Automation Guild, TribeQonf).

• Built a YouTube channel with an Espresso Introduction video that has 20K views to date.

• Produced 2 open-source courses for Test Automation University (API Testing in Python, Automated Visual Testing).

• Started this newsletter

• Leveraged my network to secure a job at Microsoft via a strong referral.

Sounds interesting. Tell me more?

If this is somewhat interesting to you, read on

Let’s break down how you can actually build a personal brand as an engineer.

Here are a few ideas, roughly in the order that it panned out personally for me.

1. Do standout work and build your professional network in the company itself

2. Write a blog

3. Give talks at conferences

4. Create open source courses

5. Write a newsletter

6. Start a YouTube channel

7. Appear in podcast as a guest

8. Mentor engineers in the open

Spoiler alert: I do all of these, not at the same time, but whatever feels natural in the moment.

Also, this is one path.

You don’t necessarily need to do all of these. Just doing one itself may be enough! Choose your own adventure.

You can build a strong personal brand multiple ways, and above are some ways to build an audience.

Do standout work

This is a no brainer, you need to do a good job on your teams and organizations and work with your manager to ensure people know about your impact.

I know many extremely strong engineers who don’t do any of the below stuff and still have a strong network by virtue of working on meaningful projects in good companies.

I recently started writing a series on what a standout senior engineer looks like at BigTech and fast paced startups. Feel free to give them a read and subscribe to not miss new ones as they come out. This is 14 years of my career advice and mental models distilled in an easy to consume and hopefully engaging format.

1. Managing up as a Software Engineer

2. Senior engineering traits: Be specific and clear

3. Senior Engineering Traits: High agency and ownership

4. Senior Engineering Traits: Come with solutions not problems!

Start a blog

My quickest advice to build a brand; start writing a blog or a newsletter.

It could be on any tech topic you feel passionate about.

If you are a SDET, write about Automation, CI/CD, DevOps, Testing mindset.

An Android dev? Sure, write about Android framework, how you develop and test, app fundamentals, different UI architectures etc.

And so on…

Let me share my personal origin story on how I started down this path.

Back in 2016, I was a mid level engineer in a product based company with just 18+ folks in a small office in MG road, Bangalore.

I was a decent communicator at the time, but did not have any structured writing or note taking practice.

One day, I was sitting next to a Software Architect with 14+ years of experience. I saw him calmly taking meticulous plain text notes on a notepad on a cool project that he was working on. He had a short description and basically a bunch of to do’s lying around and some interesting tid bits.

I was intrigued and asked him, do you take notes for everything? He roughly responded like yeah, it helps me remember stuff better and also builds a lot of clarity. This is a good practice to follow.

I liked the idea and I was inspired by his writing discipline and started taking my own notes in a personal OneNote notebook.

Any topic I learned about, I would add a new section and page and take down quick snippets for my own reference.

Side Quest: I later on migrated from OneNote → Markdown → Google docs and wrote a bit about my plain text notetaking system here. The blog started on wordpress, went to medium and finally to Jekyll and Github pages. Yeah! I experiment with stuff all the time. 🙂

Two years later, I joined a hyper scale startup in Bengaluru. It was a fantastic learning environment and my first ever startup experience

I saw the leadership there really encouraged their engineers to write technical blogs on company medium site. They even had a 2K INR Amazon voucher as an incentive. A damn good move to motivate engineers if you ask me.

So I thought, why the heck not? I had my dusty notes on Python and was also missing writing some Python, as I was thrown into the world of static typed languages like Java and had the instant resistance that naturally comes from moving from a dynamic language to a static one. Yeah, I was a bit naive then.

I wrote a quick humble blog on May 27, 2018 on Duck typing in python. Nothing fancy, a less than 1 minute read

I liked the feeling, it felt like I understood the topic a bit better now. It was a quick blog on a wordpress site.

I liked automation and dabbling in technologies and felt, wouldn’t it be cool to write about these micro concepts, the hacks, one day at a time.

That gave me the idea for my personal brand: “automation hacks” and led me to continue writing on automationhacks.io.

I wrote quite frequently and would usually write 2-3 blogs every month covering anything I was learning, any conference I went to and so on. I also started cross posting these blogs on LinkedIn and Twitter (now X).

In the process, I refined my writing process, tone and voice with each new blog. Integrated Google analytics to know my customers as well.

I recently took a look at analytics for last year itself and realised I had 10K new readers in the last year itself

With a global audience, India, China and US forming the top regions by reader demographics

This led to also organically acquiring 10K followers on LinkedIn, over the years and a growing network of peers who I could connect with to get opportunities, learn from or even mentor.

Speak at conferences and meetups

In 2016, I attended my first Selenium Conf in Bengaluru sponsored by my then company.

There were fantastic speakers on stage and I was so impressed by the depth of their experience and the willingness to share it all for free for the benefit of the community.

I realised speaking and attending conferences is a really good way to:

1. Learn a topic deeper

2. Connect with peer speakers and other attendees

3. Build a network

I gave my first conference talk in 2019 at AppiumConf and wrote about that journey here, starting from how I wrote my CFP and got accepted as well as my experience of the conference.

Turns out, there are few neat benefits of being a speaker at a conference.

1. You don’t have to pay for your ticket

2. You sometimes get free accommodation.

3. People come up and speak to you automatically (this is especially helpful if you are introverted and find it hard to spark a conversation with strangers)

4. Your communication, presentation and networking skills automatically improve.

5. You get inspired by how different people are either solving similar problems to yours or novel problems that you haven’t even thought of yet.

6. Stickers are quite cool and fun.

I have till date delivered 7 talks at AppiumConf, SeleniumConf, Automation Guild, TribeQonf.

Each one on a different topic that I was learning at that point in time and have met multiple folks at these events, including a person that I stayed in touch with over the years and who helped me land my current job at Microsoft via a strong referral. We are actually colleagues now. So yeah, this truly does pay off if you engage in the right behaviors.

Create courses

I had previously written about how I met Angie Jones at Appium Conf 2019 and that led me to create my first couple of open source courses on Automation at Test Automation University by Applitools

This could also be another way for you to prove your command over a particular subject

This also led me to dip my toes into the world of tech education content creation.

Figuring out how to record, edit videos and produce a course with Q&A, code samples and transcripts was not easy, but I learn’t a lot and till date I have been humbled to receive messages from learners on LinkedIn on how these courses helped them learn essential automation concepts.

I produced 2 courses

1. API Testing in Python

2. Automated Visual Testing with Python

Start a newsletter

I wrote a free tech blog for 4 years from 2018 to 2022 and felt like it was mostly a pull based model. Anyone would discover my writing via different channels and then if they felt like it read the blog they wanted.

I wanted to have better distribution and what better way than to start a newsletter, on substack no less. It was all the rage back in 2022.

I was a Senior Software Engineer at Meta London and was exploring creating a course on Android espresso for WhatsApp developers.

I announced Introducing 📢: The “Automation hacks” 🧑🏻‍💻 newsletter 🦾 on May 02, 2022 and started writing regular newsletter on substack

I first wrote a series of newsletter posts on Android espresso as I was learning about the topic myself.

Writing an open source series is a great litmus test about whether you yourself understand the topic well or not.

And start a YouTube channel

I also submitted this as a workshop idea to Selenium Conf and was glad to see this getting accepted.

I unfortunately caught Covid in June 2022 and it was a pretty challenging time for me and my family, yet I did not let it stop me from presenting.

I recorded the entire workshop, edited it with some interactive Q&A questions and then delivered it as a watch party where I was in the chat group with the audience, helping answer their questions and also trying to keep it engaging. I did not know if I succeeded in the endeavor but it was a good learning experience.

I also had a long standing wish wherein I wanted to start a Tech education channel on YouTube and thought this was a nice opportunity.

I had the content designed to be totally open source and I edited and launched it on @automationhacks youtube channel on August 2, 2022 as a YouTube playlist so that folks can watch the video section that is most relevant to them.

To my surprise, this series hit it off with the audience with the Introduction video having 20K views till date (my most popular video)

I later launched other playlists on different topics like interviewing, AI, Report portal, Grpc Testing, Java, and a few podcasts and talks that I’ve delivered over the years.

Yes, I know it is a pretty modest following of 1.36k, however I personally have a lot of fun making these videos and in the process learn a topic deeper. The act of preparing content, recording, creating associated artifacts like code, docs and then editing it is a long and engaging process, but pretty interesting.

My content creation philosophy so far has been quite simple.

“If I enjoy creating the content and even one person benefits from it, it’s worthwhile to spend the time”

On a side note, everytime I mention I have a Newsletter and YouTube channel, in an interview. I always get curious follow ups and numerous interviewers appreciate the effort I take in giving back to the community and helping them develop further.

Appear on podcasts

Another second order effect of learning and building in public is that few folks notice you and also approach you as a podcast guest.

I have appeared on 3 testing focussed podcasts, a couple of them in Hindi (with captions) and one in English as well.

If you have a tech podcast and want me to come onboard. I’m always open to connecting. Please reach out

Mentor others

During this entire journey, I got a lot of LinkedIn messages asking if I offer paid mentoring and came across Topmate platform.

I decided, why not make it official?

I created my account on topmate at Gaurav Singh (@automationhacks) | Topmate and started offering career guidance, 1:1 mentoring and mock interview practice as well.

To avoid letting this consume all my free time, I only offered slots on Sunday afternoon for almost an year and now recently opened a mid week slot as well in more US/Europe friendly timezones as well. It has been quite satisfying to see few folks that I’ve mentored do well and even land roles in their current companies.

Conclusion

You may be thinking,

Wow, how does Gaurav find the time to do all these activities while living a balanced life and doing a full time job at a BigTech company.

The answer is simple

I don’t do all of these at the same time, few of these have defined time on the calendar and others I find time based on what I feel strongly about.

If I feel like writing a blog/newsletter (just like this one), I shut down everything else and just write. I also try to make a point of converting anything that I learn into private notes and then into a newsletter.

My aim is to be a net positive contributor to the engineering world and give my subscribers a direct line to what I’m thinking and observing as I grow in my career.

I hope all the things that I do have been useful, helping or somewhat interesting to you.

Wanna help grow this further?

Please subscribe to the newsletter.automationhacks.io and YouTube channel (@automationhacks) for more insights into software engineering, automation and AI, or connect on topmate.io/automationhacks for a personalized 1:1 session. If you subscribe to the newsletter, you can get access to me directly via the subscriber chat and also get free previews of paid blogs.