> It takes 1~3 hours to stick a flag in the Internet about one topic. Having one flag stuck in the Internet beats zero flags, by a lot. I gave one rather medio

> It takes 1~3 hours to stick a flag in the Internet about one topic. Having one flag stuck in the Internet beats zero flags, by a lot. I gave one rather mediocre talk at a regional tech conference with maybe ~100 attendees. The video is online. From that day forward inbound interest skyrocketed. I'm not talking about cold calls or LinkedIn requests, I'm talking about startup CTOs asking me out for coffee to chat about my future, managers asking if I can consult on their project, invitations to speak at other events. When I lost my job, I called those people back and had more than enough consulting work to tide me over. As a direct result I now work at Twitter—before I was at a failing startup that nobody's ever heard of. In other words, speaking at that conference opened the door to >$200,000 in consulting work and increased income in the two years since. The bar to speaking at events like that is not high. Every major city in the US has programming conferences. You don't need OSCON or JavaOne, pretty much any decent event will do so long as they record and post the talks. Link that from yourname.com and look forward to lots of coffee chats.