Publish Your Work

How to share the projects and tools you’ve already built so people can see what you know. This isn’t about fake personal branding. It’s about showing your work and helping others solve similar problems.
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  6 minute read  

You’ve been doing serious IT work for decades. You finally bought a domain. You even got a blog live. So now what?

Let’s walk through how to actually share your work, especially if you built something worth showing off, like one of the internal tools we talk about here.

This isn’t about “building your personal brand” in some fake marketing way. This is about helping your future self get noticed for the work you’re already doing. You don’t need to be famous. But if you’re solving real problems, let people know.

Step 1: Put it on GitHub

The first thing is to get your code (or script or project) into a public GitHub repo. If you’re not sure how, we’ve got a full walk-through here:

How To Open Source

Make sure you:

  • Add a README.md that actually explains what the tool does
  • Pick a license (MIT is a safe, permissive default)
  • Include a couple examples of how to run it or what problem it solves
Tip

Use an LLM like Copilot in VS Code to help with this. For example:

  • “Act as an experienced engineer in bash scripting who is meticulous about best-practices. Please review and correct this script, without breaking any existing functionality. This includes things like: input validation, error handling, showing output to the user for info, warn, and errors, and include a --help screen that shows how to use the script.”
  • “Please generate a README.md for this GitHub repository and scripts. This should include what the script does, any prerequisites and include some example usage.”

Commit your changes and push them to GitHub.

So now, the “asset” is out on GitHub, but no one knows about it yet.

Step 2: Write a Blog Post About It

This is where you explain the “why”. What itch did this scratch? What problems did you run into? What tradeoffs did you make?

You don’t need to be a writer. Use ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to help you outline and clean it up. Just be real.

Tip

When using LLM’s to write content, it won’t sound like you and it may need some major tweaking. However, it’s usually easier to have it write a rough first draft and you correct 20% of it, then to write the whole thing from scratch yourself.

In modern day, that’s sadly what it comes down to. You can do it “the old fashioned way”, and this is going to take you all night. Or, you can use an AI to get a big chunk of it done, and you are really just editing it down, changing some things, but being able to get it done in 30 minutes instead of 3 hours.

A solid structure:

  1. What was the problem or annoyance?
  2. What did you build?
  3. How does it work? (include code samples or screenshots)
  4. What’s next?
Title Matters

A title like “How I Used a Bash Script To Monitor RDS CPU Spikes” will outperform “My First Blog Post” every time. No one cares if it’s your first post, or why you’ve gone so long, etc - just get to the point and talk as if you were talking to a friend.

Step 3: Share It With People Like You

You don’t have to become a content creator. But sharing your post on LinkedIn (or wherever your peers hang out) makes a difference.

Use prompt engineering here. You can literally tell ChatGPT:

Act as a social media expert on content creation and SEO. See this blog post [insert post URL] and give me an effective blurb for LinkedIn to get clicks. It should sound real and authentic, not all salesy.

Review and discuss with the AI if you don’t like it or it’s not “you” - definitely. When you have somthing you like, then you paste that result as a LinkedIn post.

Where Else Could You Share It?

Do the same kind of things with ChatGPT for other platforms. Here are some ideas:

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter/X (short thread format works well)
  • Reddit (in a relevant tech or IT subreddit)
  • Facebook groups you’re part of
  • Email it to coworkers or past colleagues

Do as much or as little as you want. The goal is to get it in front of people who might find it useful.

Step 4 (Challenge): Tune Your SEO

Once you’ve done a couple rounds of this, you’ll start to see what resonates. Here are some optional next steps if you want to keep leveling up. One of the next things you’ll notice that make a difference is how your links look when shared. There are some tools that can help with that:

  • Use LinkedIn Post Inspector to preview how your blog will look when shared
  • Try free SEO tools like SEOptimer, Seobility, or Seomator
  • Use Chrome DevTools -> Lighthouse tab to test how your site performs and what you could improve
  • Create a consistent thumbnail style for blog posts (dimensions, fonts, etc)
  • Standardize your tags/categories for better discoverability

For example, this very page looks like this when shared:

SEO Preview

You don’t need to become a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) nerd, but there are a handful of things you can do once to set up your site, and then it’s generally hands-off after that.

Why care about SEO?

The reason you even have to care about SEO is because it’s used absolutely everywhere. When you share a link on any social media platform, it reads your OGP tags and uses that to to create the preview, and know how to share your post. These are tags like this in the HTML <head> section of your page, usually managed by the blogging/CMS platform that you use:

HTML Headers

If you don’t have these things set up, or set up correctly, that can really hurt your click-through rate and engagement. Meaning, the platform simply won’t show your post to as many people, because it doesn’t look like a good post.

This doesn’t have to be Day One stuff. This is marked as optional because you can always come back and improve/Level-Up your content later. If you want to launch with your best foot forward, then this is worth thinking about.

Resources

Here are some helpful hashtags and communities to reach IT professionals when you share your work.

Social Media Hashtags

For LinkedIn and X/Twitter, these hashtags help IT folks find your content:

General IT:

  • #DevOps #SysAdmin #ITOps #TechOps #Infrastructure
  • #CloudComputing #AWS #Azure #GCP #Kubernetes
  • #Automation #Scripting #Bash #PowerShell #Python

Specific Topics:

  • #Monitoring #Observability #Security #InfoSec #CyberSecurity
  • #Database #PostgreSQL #MySQL #Redis #ElasticSearch
  • #Networking #VPN #DNS #LoadBalancing #CDN
  • #CI/CD #GitOps #Docker #Containerization #Microservices
Tip

Don’t use more than 3-5 hashtags per post. Pick the ones most relevant to your specific content.

Reddit Communities

These subreddits are where IT professionals hang out and share useful tools:

General IT:

Development & DevOps:

Specific Technologies:

Important

Read each subreddit’s rules before posting. Most require you to be an active community member, not just someone dropping links. Engage genuinely first.

Summary

Publishing your work doesn’t mean becoming a YouTuber or SEO nerd. It just means getting your stuff out in the open.

  • Push your code to GitHub
  • Write a short blog post explaining it
  • Share it somewhere your peers will see it

There is limited downside and unbounded upside to doing this.