Get an external email address

Dear new developer,

When you are starting at any company, you’ll get a company address: dan@company.com. You’ll want to use that for all company communications.

You may have a personal email address: fuzzyguy@gmail.com (not my real personal email address 🙂 ).

But as soon as you can, you’ll want to get an external email address at a reputable provider like gmail or protonmail and have a professional looking email address, something like danmoore@gmail.com. If your fullname is taken, then add digits or variations: dannymoore@gmail.com, dan12@gmail.com, etc.

If you want to get fancy, register your own domain name and then set up an email address: dan@danmoore.com.

There are a number of nice things about having this external email address:

• You can put it on your resume when you are applying for jobs and it will look professional. Though there are a lot of means of communication, email is still the major method of cross business communication.
• You can have it for life, which means in ten years when you want to reach out to that one woman who was a linux kernel specialist, you can search for the message you sent to her. I have had my personal email address for almost twenty years. I don’t often search far back, but when I do it’s nice to have one place to go and look.
• You can use it in your goodbye email to your company to keep in touch with people. (You will eventually leave the company, and while I suggest you connect to everyone on LinkedIn, some people don’t use it. Almost everyone has an email.)
• You can use it as the email address of record for your “developer brand” accounts. These accounts will follow you for life and you don’t want them tied to any company email address. Things like Stackoverflow, github, or your online community accounts should all be tied to this professional, external email address.

Sincerely,

Dan