Rajesh Setty has published a free pdf book about Personal Branding for Technology Professionals (PDF link).
His number one premise (to me at least) is that you need more than just technical skills if you want to "thrive in the marketplace for the long-term". You also need personal branding. It's not just about branding, you need short-term and long-term skills, but branding yourself helps you get the most out of it.
Oh, for the people who cringe when hearing the word "branding": there's a whole list of common reasons why people find it challenging to try it or do it or to even think about it. Perhaps one of them will resonate with you.
I'll have to delve more in-depth through the book, but I noticed already one area that might need attention: leverage all your projects. Try to make your projects work together. Build leverage. It's almost military theory in that sense. Attack at one place. The enemy has to react to that. Use that reaction as a lever to make another attack easier. And again. Let your projects support eachother in the same way. At least, that's what Rajesh is suggesting!
I'll give you two examples of things I know I've done (perhaps unconciously) that help me with my "branding" (if you want to call it that). I see googleability as an important goal. Just google for "Reinout van Rees". Just try to find some old classmates via google and you'll see how unbelievably unfindable many people are.
optilude
writes great code and
Martin Aspeli writes great documentation. If only I could find one
person that could do both..." :-)In my case, if someone refers to me in an email or so, it will always be "Reinout". It can't hurt the googleability.
Request: I'd like to know what you'd tell your colleagues/friends/clients about me if they would ask about it. One of the sets of questions in the book is "How do your close friend describe you to their friends", "How do your colleagues describe you to their friends", "How do your clients describe you to their colleagues". So tell me if you wouldn't mind. Just one or two sentences or so. reinout@vanrees.org . :-)
My name is Reinout van Rees and I program in Python, I live in the Netherlands, I cycle recumbent bikes and I have a model railway.
Most of my website content is in my weblog. You can keep up to date by subscribing to the automatic feeds (for instance with Google reader):
Reinout is an open source developer whose professional goal it is to optimize his (and your) computer experience.