So here's the deal, a lot of us programming aren't doing it cause we want to land cool software engineering jobs at big tech companies or build the next big thing, I'm sure some of you would agree that sometimes we just like to... well, code, and being an introvert and a developer can be quite complicated as well, let's look at how that works for a sec.
How does that work?
Well, coding as a hobby is awesome, but the thing is if you are going to get serious about it, you have to get serious, and one of the major things you are going to have to do is networking, yeah, that's right, meeting other people, developers like your self, this is useful for several reasons for starting from just learning from other people to job recommendations and all that, but as an introvert, it's quite easy to feel left out when you see tech events, podcasts and all of that been hosted by your dev friends and it's like the concept has been tailored to exclude introverts, but that's not always the case.
So, What can you do?
Well first of all you need to understand something, networking isn't 100% necessary, yeah.. meeting new people can be a choice, and the community isn't really tailored for extroverts alone, you can work your way around and networking can have a totally different meaning to you. here are quite a few things I would recommend:
Starting with close friends
Being an introvert doesn't mean you can't have friends, you probably have a friend or two which means you can start from your little circle, talking to your developer friend can totally help you get the hang of talking to new folks when you attend larger meetups, so code a line or two with your best buddy and just talk.
Fewer Meetups
Whilst there are a lot of people who focus on developer relations as a career and attend like, a lot of events and meetups, you don't have to, like meetups for you can happen probably once in a long time, yeah, meetups are good but they don't have to happen frequently especially for introverts like us, meeting new people once in a while can make you feel less overwhelmed, and giving it space might actually make you want to attend one, you know keeping the excitement there.
So what I'm saying, in essence, is, if you feel like you don't want to meet new people, you can decide not to, there are thousands of developers who made it solo, but as I said earlier not feeling the pressure to network, makes it feel less like a prerequisite and more of something you can decide to when you feel like, knowing this can remove a lot of pressure, and trust me they are a lot of nice developers that'd enjoy hearing from you... hey, like me! if you need another developer friend, I am here, check out my contact info and Twitter and LinkedIn links on my hashnode profile! Hope you had an interesting read! see you in the next one...