This post was inspired by some of your favorite online developer personalities, with addition to my own experience. PS) We don't hate you, promise. Adding a timely tweet I saw directly after drafting this blog post:

Reaching out to strangers on the internet doesn't seem like a big deal, after all what problems can a simple "hello" cause. Let me stop you right there, and let's back up. I LOVE our online community, and I do my best to help people (without making it my full time job). But, a simple "hello" message will not get a response from me, or most others, but I'll say me for the simplicity of this post.

It's not because I'm rude, or introverted, or hate everyone. Nope, my DM's would not be open if that was the case. If I responded to every "hello", "hi" or "how are you doing", I would never get anything done. Ever... and I really don't have that many followers compared to your favorite online devs. So, if you really want to reach out to someone.. how should you do it?

Respect Their Time

That's it! Don't ask a question that can easily be Googled, or Stack Overflowed (we don't have time to debug your app anyway). Get right to the point. I'm 95% more likely to respond to a message along the lines of "Hey, love your work, I was wondering how you got to where you're at?" or "Hi, do you have advice around not rage quitting your job?" or "Hey, could I bounce some ideas off of you about (problem)?". By opening the message and responding, I know what we're going to be talking about. Otherwise, it's almost too scary to respond. Really.

One more thing to keep in mind - you may have been following me for a while, and you may feel like you know me pretty well.. but keep in mind, we are still strangers. Doesn't mean we can't be "online friends" eventually, but just that no relationship has been built yet. Yet. Thank you for reading this, I hope this post will help you in your journey to network, as it's helped me be apart of a great and safe community.