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Last week I posted a question to the dev.to community. It's a pretty simple question and it honestly wasn't a big deal. There have been about 30 people that have participated in it but it's probably been viewed by a few hundred. In a world of viral images, videos, and news, this was pretty insignificant. But it seemed somewhat big for me.

I don't consider myself to have awesome ideas. I follow and work with a lot of people that are very smart. I sometimes make contributions that are as valuable as theirs, but most of the time I try to work hard and do my job as best I can and provide value in that way. As far as someone to cause ripples in the water, I don't consider myself someone that really could be doing that. One day I'd hope to be as smart and as good as someone like that, but I don't think I'm there yet.

When I joined the community, I noticed their welcome message which reads, in part:
Where programmers share ideas and help each other grow. All developers are welcome to submit stories, tutorials, questions, or anything worth discussing.
When I joined, I thought that sounded nice and welcoming but didn't think much of it or think that I'd ever post anything there. Maybe I'd link to a blog article eventually if I ever wrote a particularly good one, but I didn't think I'd get too involved. Mainly consuming and not sharing.

Then I got thinking a lot recently about career plans. I felt a need to create and had been thinking about it a lot. As a result, I got curious about other software engineer's plans. As I was thinking about that, I remembered that the dev.to community is a place to ask questions like that. So, I did it. I took some time to set the question up and then posted it to the community. I was hoping to get a lot of responses but I didn't expect much from it.

Within a few hours of posting that question, there were a number of good responses and it was fun to see. I enjoyed reading them and hoped more would join the discussion. I still didn't think much of it, because, after all, I'm just a software engineer at a company that most people haven't heard about.

Then the next day one of my coworkers stopped me and said, "Did you see @ThePracticalDev tweeted your question?" I had been wondering why I'd been getting so many emails. Apparently a few more people had joined the discussion! Then I thought about it a bit more... The Practical Dev has some 160k+ followers on Twitter. Some people have retweeted that link... My little question could have been seen by around 200k+ people. That's pretty cool! While my question isn't going viral, that's way more exposure than I've ever gotten.

It was strange to think that people I've never met nor will likely ever meet have seen my name, read my question, and some have even responded. Some have read parts of this blog. But such is the world we live in these days. There are so many opportunities to connect and so many ways to do so, it's commonplace now to have an online presence of some sort. Having a large audience is even sought after. While I may never have a large following or anything influential to say, it was fun to experience that to a small degree with my simple question.

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