Big Tech Club
Speculative Essay
On why the current options for developer identity fall short, what a simple profile with optional skill discovery could look like, and why it'll only work with an existing community.
Software engineers have plenty of places to be found — just no place that was built for them. GitHub is for version control and collaboration, not identity. It doubles, awkwardly, as a portfolio, but that was never its job. A developer who spent years inside private corporate repos looks, to an outside observer, like someone who barely shipped anything. Contribution graphs help some — a green square is a green square — but they signal activity, not skill. The profile page exists, but any actual self-description requires a small hack: a repo named after your username, a README.md, and a push. But none of it makes you discoverable by skill, depth, or location. GitHub's model is built around repositories, not people.
LinkedIn is useful for what it was built to do: work history, professional connections, and the broad surface area of a résumé made public. Most engineers are on it. That's not going anywhere. But it's a poor answer to a different question — how do you signal what you actually know, at what level, to someone who can act on it? You can list skills, pin five at the top, and get endorsements — but none of it conveys depth or context. They're just labels — no structure behind them, no way for anyone to filter or search by how well you know something. And for visibility, the platform quietly nudges you toward posting — treating engagement as a proxy for relevance. It works, in a hamster-wheel kind of way.
Software engineers have their own corners of the internet, but nothing purpose-built for presenting who they are with a findability layer. Identity platforms have tried — Behance for visual creatives, read.cv as a minimalist LinkedIn + Twitter for designers — but none solved discovery. The answer was never a network. It was always a directory: searchable by skill and location, like Psychology Today for therapists. Unsexy, useful, and quietly sustaining real business models for decades.
What if there were a calm, permanent place online where a developer could simply present themselves — without the overhead of maintaining a personal website, and without the noise of a social platform wrapped around them? A page you could link to from anywhere: a Twitter bio, an email signature, a conference talk slide. Something that says, clearly and quietly, here is who I am and what I do.
The minimum viable version of this is close to what Linktree already offers: a photo, a short bio, and a collection of links to wherever else you exist online — your GitHub, a personal site, a portfolio, a project you are proud of. That alone is more useful than most people's current options for a professional landing page, which is either a LinkedIn profile surrounded by algorithmic noise or a personal website that takes time to build and maintain.
The additional value comes from optional structure. If you choose to list your skills, location, and note your overall level, you become findable in ways you weren't before. Someone looking for junior or mid-level Go engineers in your city can filter to you specifically — not because you applied for something, but because you exist in a directory that makes that search possible. You do not need to fill out the structured fields to have a useful page. But if you do, it becomes more than a landing pad — it becomes a signal.
None of it is verified — and it doesn't need to be. Whoever is searching — a recruiter, a hiring manager, or an engineer looking for someone local to collaborate with — will use multiple signals to vet a person anyway. A directory just needs to surface the right people; everything else follows from there. Profiles are public and indexable by default, findable through search engines, not just within the platform. Links out to wherever you want people to go — a personal site, a portfolio, a contact form.
A directory with few members is worth nothing, no matter how well-designed or targeted it is. This will only work as a secondary product for one community, already trusted and large enough, deciding to give its members a public profile to be found through.
The business model follows from this logic. For individual engineers, the profile is free — permanently, not as a loss-leader. The value to the host organization is different: a searchable directory of their community's members is something employers will pay for access to, particularly when they already trust the community's signal. Cleaner than a recruiter's commission, and honest about what it is.
It also creates a natural opportunity for a new brand with a focused value proposition. Every profile page, every search, every interaction also becomes a touchpoint for anyone to learn about the parent company and its premium offerings. This is not a new playbook: Sentry acquired Syntax.fm and Digital Ocean acquired CSS-Tricks because developer audiences with genuine trust are worth owning. Both properties kept doing what they always did — publishing content, building audience — but every ad slot, every sponsorship mention, every banner now points to one company. The media product stays credible; the parent gets exclusive access to the attention it generates.
The right organization to build this already has most of what it needs: an engaged membership of developers who trust it, a reputation built on quality rather than scale, and inbound interest from employers who want to hire from that specific pool. The missing piece is not technical. It is the decision to give that community a presence it can actually be found through.
Whether that decision gets made is not a product question. It is a strategic one. But the engineers are already there, the employers are already asking, and the gap between those two facts is exactly the size of this idea.