I spend a crazy amount of time creating content for free on the internet. Whether it’s posting to one of my many blogs or working on one of the plugins I maintain in the WordPress repository. I do these things mainly because I enjoy helping others and I especially enjoy hearing how my plugins and blog posts have helped people with their own projects.

I also put these things on my resume because I spend a lot of time working on them and believe they’re one of my strongest selling points as far as defining who I am as a web developer. It is a little disheartening however when you put a lot of time and effort into something that ends up getting little to no traction online. It’s hard not to feel like I failed or did something wrong.

Ultimately I try not to let this get me down. If my plugins and posts help just one person then they were worth it. But then today, I was meeting with a potential client who in fact used two of my plugins for their own clients’ site. Something I had developed a few years ago with little to no traction on the internet ultimately was the deciding factor in getting this new job.

So be proud of everything you create whether it gets the response you were looking for or not. It’s a little piece of you on the internet and you never know who’s going to run across it a few years down the line.