It does work to build professional connections. A good number of my jobs came through people recognizing me from talks I've given, my writing, meetups, and work

It does work to build professional connections. A good number of my jobs came through people recognizing me from talks I've given, my writing, meetups, and working on open source projects. However it didn't help much in the interview process. I've never been in an interview where the interviewer looked at my profiles on various code hosting platforms, reviewed some of my pull requests before hand, and came into the room with a good idea of what I do and how I work. They will still ask the same pre-canned questions they are forced to ask and we're back to reversing linked lists and memoizing tree walking algorithms. It's good for getting to know folks which can help in finding places to apply to where you might already know some people. But I doubt it's going to make you stand out in the interview process itself. Update: That being said, I've been on the other side of the table and when I was the one setting up the interview process I made sure candidates knew that they could send over recent PRs they've made for us to review in order to bypass any coding exercises. I find it much easier to discuss the problem they were working on and seeing their solution is really helpful.