It helps to have one but you don’t have to use it much. I’ve landed my highest paying positions through LinkedIn, or recruiters found me elsewhere but the listing was through LinkedIn. So I have an account that has general info filled in but I don’t really touch it for anything.
Hey I can check off at least one thing from that list
Generally I start with an end goal, and break it down into logical pieces. For instance I recently wanted to make a custom soundboard for discord. First thing I needed to figure out was how to play sounds. Next was playing those sounds to a specific sound device so that it can be routed into the audio input for discord. Then I needed to figure out how to play the same sound at the same time through the audio output. Then I needed a form to interact with so I could click a button to play a sound. Then I needed to be able to load a config file so that I could update that form when I wanted to add or delete sounds. Then I needed a way to choose files to add to the sound board. And conversely a context menu so I could right click a button to remove it. Then I needed to figure out how to save and load this config file from the filesystem. Then I needed to be able to search for and update the form so I could now quickly find sounds if the list got too long. And then once I had all that working, figure out how to play the same sound multiple times before it finished resulting in a multi threaded soundboard that can interact with any sound device on the machine and saves and loads sound lists all in Python.
This is why you can spin up your own personal lemmy instance as a backup to use if your main goes down.