Ask HN: Do you use your name or a handle online for development?

I am me; I've had my online name for 3/4s of my life, so I rarely draw any distinction, however as I've got older having my real name attached to things of note, seems more important than it did. I guess it's got something to do with leaving some sort of legacy.

Both. I'm pseudonymous on this account and have a real account for real name stuff. Generally if it's hacker news stuff or Pythonista community or another community where I signed up with this name, I'll contribute with this name. If it's more productive open source work, I'll use my real name. I try not to have direct links from this account to the other, but there are small hints left over, scattered around the web if anyone is curious (please email me if you find them!).

This name is kind of ridiculous and cumbersome, and is in fact designed to be a name you recognize but don't remember.

Unprofessional? Maybe. But the point of what I do on this account is to participate in these communities. Not to make real contributions or serious projects. Not to make things I would show off in a portfolio or something, and not to collaborate with my real life friends.

I'm wary of using the same name for every community. I have different names for different communities, and this helps me keep my "automated-collection digital footprint" pretty low for each name.

Stereotyping a dev community to use pseudonyms is not a bad thing at all. Sure, it's not strictly in our career interests, but it's good for peace of mind. I have some embarrassing comments on here from a year or two ago. That's ok. I was in high school then. I don't have to worry about it being associated with my real name by an employer -- if the employer puts in the effort to find data that connects my two names, then they've put in far too much effort and it seems they're likely to hire me anyway.

There's something to be said for altruistic contributions that don't necessarily keep your own career interests in mind.

I too am interested in seeing what the non-dev audience has to say. I think they may have the same privacy concerns.

I don't seek employment, so... anonymous

I use my real name. My real name is distinct enough that when you search for it, you find results almost exclusively about the real me.

When you search for my real name, you find almost exclusively accounts on sites like github, and a couple others, where I get to control entirely what is being shown. That's pretty good internet real estate and branding. At that point, it doesn't matter that my name is somewhat rare. If my name was Brad Pitt, by some sad coincidence, I could never own the internet for that name. But for mine, I can easily. Makes me appear like a way bigger deal than I am. And I don't want the first search result for my name to be my facebook. I don't want to be my facebook. I'd rather be my github. Not exclusively for professional reasons.

When it comes to professionalism:

We internet people don't get weird looks when we show someone something we've done under a "nickname", but we also don't get attribution for it. If your github name is "randominternetguy69", you might show it to your interviewer, but you won't get it attributed to you. Not because they don't believe its you - simply because you don't feel confident enough about it to own it. If you don't have confidence in your own work, why should they.

Couple of weeks back, I was discussing this with some friends.

The one with my real name and known to my employer and all with a link to my twitter account. Here I am cautious of what I saw and remember I can be help accountable for this. I learned this from personal experience, where my manager started questioning me about my interactions online. Also, my employer did not want to talk tech in online forums as they worry that competition will be helped. I was even barred from sharing the modifications I made to an open-source project. Plus a stranger can easily track me.

Then I have an id that only people close to me are aware of.

I use my real name on just about all of my online accounts. I sometimes wish I hadn't, but that ship has sailed. I keep most of my social media accounts as locked down as possible, and I've deleted a lot of them.

Github is interesting because, in the case of really popular projects (which I don't have, so this doesn't apply to me,) you probably want the project name to be the namespace, rather than the developer name. I personally find it a bit annoying that this isn't more common, but I understand why. Who wants to manage a separate account for each respository?

>do you think it is unprofessional to use anything other than your name?

If you intend for people to pay you, it's professional to use your real name, and not present yourself as a persona. Otherwise, I don't think it matters, but you shouldn't expect people to take you too seriously if you publish code under an immature or ridiculous pseudonym.

> do you have any thoughts or opinions on the "branding" (I hate that term, ftr) of developers and our community as a whole

We need to be better at selling ourselves, rather than letting ourselves be sold. Much of the modern branding behind dev culture was created by marketers as a way of exploiting naive, young talent, in a similar way that the "American Dream" was created to exploit immigrant and lower-middle class labor.