Here is my LinkedIn profile in its current iteration: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robAI

Hopefully, if you're reading this well into the future, it looks professional, powerful, and clean. As it is right now, it's not that. It's a far cry from the ultra-sleek and stylized profiles that exist out there today.

That's not to say it's bad. The profile I started with was bad. Like a lot of people, I had an old, dusty LinkedIn account that had been created as part of some long-forgotten college assignment years ago. I had no connections, no profile picture, and not even the correct name.

Now, a week later, it resembles something professional. It's got a decent profile pic, a whopping 16 connections and counting, and there's actual information there about my skills and abilities that might interest someone who's looking for people to fill roles. It's been a steep learning curve, but I feel like I'm starting to make a little bit of progress.

The Profile Photo

^^This was me five years ago before I got my life together. OR, me last week trying to figure out how to use my camera and slumping low in my chair so I would fit into frame.

I thought about making this into a full-on guide for how to take a good LinkedIn photo. But there's already tons of guides out there for that (here's the one I used, there's about a million others), plus I'm not particularly interested or qualified to talk about it. I want to keep this blog mostly about tech stuff. So I'm just going to summarize.

I followed that guide's advice and went out in my backyard armed with my DSLR camera that I bought a few years ago and have used maybe five times. It took me a little while to get back up to speed with how all the knobs and dials worked (and to fight off the bees that somehow mistook my electronic camera for a bed of flowers), but soon I was snapping away using the remote control so I could take photos myself.

I took a ton, in different spots of my backyard with different backgrounds and lighting. There were about 200 when all was said and done. Probably overkill, but I wanted to make absolutely sure there was at least one decent one so I wouldn't have to do the whole thing over again (standing outside in the baking 95-degree sun in business casual attire isn't the most pleasant thing).

Here's what I came up with:

There were a few other potentials, but this one got the highest ratings on Photofeeler. A little bit of editing with Pixlr and this is the final result:

Not bad for a few hour's effort, according to Photofeeler and my friend who took a look as well. In the future, I hope to improve this greatly, not just for LinkedIn but for all my branding (I'm reading John Sonmez' book "Soft Skills" and the bits about marketing yourself really resonated with me). But for now, it'll get the job done.

Now, it's on to actually apply for jobs (as of this posting I've already been doing that for a few days).