Publishing on HackerNoon Is a Badge You Get to Keep

A few weeks ago, we came across a video from a developer walking through the CV that helped take him from Lagos to London.

His name is Pleasant Balogun. He started coding as a teenager, built his first tools using his mom’s Android phone, launched products, had companies acquire his work, and eventually qualified for the UK’s Global Talent route.

But there was one small part of his story that caught our attention.

Back in 2021, Pleasant won HackerNoon Contributor of the Year for Developer Tools.

https://youtu.be/GEFTtKAdzyw?si=HuGIp9PRoQWWg6ET&t=534&embedable=true

Looking back on it in his video, Pleasant said the recognition “contributed to… everything downstream.” He then went on to talk about the projects, companies, acquisitions, and experience that eventually formed the application that took him to London.

Now, before anyone starts rewriting their immigration plans around their HackerNoon profile: we are not saying a HackerNoon award got Pleasant his UK visa.

He doesn’t say that either.

What his story does show is something we think writers sometimes underestimate:

Putting your work somewhere credible creates receipts.

Your Byline Becomes Part of Your Career

Anyone can create a HackerNoon account and submit a story, but not every submission makes it to publication. Every story goes through editorial review, and as we’ve written before, roughly 60% of the stories that enter our editorial queue don’t make the cut.

That selectivity matters because when you publish something useful, technical, original, or genuinely insightful, you’re doing more than adding another post to the internet. You’re creating a public record of what you knew, what you built, what you believed, or the problems you could solve at a particular point in your career.

That record can take on different forms of value over time. Six months later, it might be something you send to a recruiter; two years later, it could help establish your expertise; and five years later, it might sit in your portfolio alongside the projects, jobs, awards, conference talks, and open-source contributions you’ve accumulated along the way.

You rarely know which piece of work will matter most in the future, and Pleasant probably didn’t either.

Look Around at Who You’re Publishing Next To

There’s another part of publishing on HackerNoon that’s easy to miss when you’re staring at an empty draft: the community you’re joining.

Take a look around, and you’ll find engineers and advocates from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Netflix, and beyond sharing their ideas. In October 2024, Anton Osika also published an article on HackerNoon exploring what AI might mean for SaaS. Today, his HackerNoon profile identifies him as the co-founder of Lovable.

That’s the community you’re entering when you hit submit: not one where every writer works at Microsoft, Amazon, or the next billion-dollar startup, and certainly not one where job titles automatically make someone’s ideas better. HackerNoon has always been a place for people building technology to explain what they’re seeing, often before the rest of the industry has completely caught up.

You might be reading an engineer solving a production problem at massive scale, a founder building a company nobody has heard of yet, or a 17-year-old creating something on his mom’s phone. The point is that you don’t always know who someone is going to become, and you don’t need to know their title to recognize that they have something worth sharing.

Publish Before You Think You’re “Qualified”

This is probably the bigger lesson: a lot of people wait until they have the impressive title, the successful startup, the senior role, or the decade of experience before they feel qualified to write publicly. But building a body of work is often what helps them get there in the first place.

Write about something you built, explain the weird bug you spent three days solving, or document an experiment that failed. Make the argument everyone on your team keeps having, or share a technical decision you’d make differently today. Your first article doesn’t need to establish you as the world’s foremost expert; it just needs to show that you have something real to contribute.

That work can compound in unexpected ways. A side project becomes a job interview, a GitHub repository catches the attention of a founder, or an article becomes proof that you understood a technology years before it became fashionable. Even a HackerNoon award can become a line on your CV that’s still worth talking about five years later.

You can’t predict where any of this will lead, but you can give your work a better chance of being discovered by putting it somewhere people can find it.

So, if you’ve been sitting on an idea because you don’t think your name is big enough yet, remember that the people whose names seem big today had to publish their first piece somewhere, too.

Start writing.

Want to take this further? (HackerNoon’s Blogging Course)

HackerNoon’s Blogging Course is designed for beginners and writers who’ve published a bit and want to level up. It’s organized into 8 modules created by experienced writers and editors, and it includes topics like:

• How to Find Your “Voice” and Ideal Writing Workflow
• SEO + Storytelling: Write Content That Ranks and Resonates
• How to Write Great Articles That People Will Read

That’s it for today.

Until next time, Hackers! 💚