Recruiters and hiring managers spend under a minute on your profile before deciding whether to keep reading. A developer bio done right turns that minute into an interview. This guide walks through what to include, what to cut, and how to make one link do the work of a resume, a portfolio and a GitHub profile combined.

1. Lead with what you build, not job titles

"Senior Software Engineer at Acme" tells a reader almost nothing. "I build payment infrastructure that moves $2M/day" tells them everything. Your tagline is the single highest-leverage sentence on the page — make it concrete, outcome-focused, and specific to the work you want more of. Skip buzzwords like passionate and results-driven; nobody searches for those, and nobody believes them.

2. Show proof of work, not claims of skill

A skills list says "I know Rust." A GitHub contribution graph, a published crate with download numbers, and a linked repo say "here's the Rust I shipped." Wherever possible, replace static claims with live evidence:

GitHub — contribution activity, pinned repos, stars on projects you own
Stack Overflow — reputation and top answers in your specialty
LeetCode — solve counts if you're interviewing for algorithm-heavy roles
npm / crates / PyPI — real download numbers for packages you maintain
Writing — an RSS feed of your blog posts or talk recordings

Live widgets beat screenshots because they can't go stale. A bio showing last week's commits signals an active builder; a portfolio "last updated 2023" signals the opposite.

3. Curate three projects, not thirty links

The classic portfolio mistake is listing everything. Pick the three projects that best represent the work you want to be hired for, and for each one answer: what problem did it solve, what did you personally build, and what happened as a result? A shipped side project with 200 real users outweighs ten abandoned repos.

4. Make it possible to contact you — with signal

"DM me on Twitter" loses serious inquiries in the noise. A qualified inbox — where the person reaching out states who they are and why — filters recruiters spraying templates from founders with a real offer. At minimum, put a single clear contact method above the fold and answer it.

5. One link everywhere

The whole point of a bio page is consolidation: one URL in your GitHub profile, X bio, conference slides, email signature and resume header. Every place you exist online should funnel to the same page, so the page's search ranking compounds instead of splitting across five half-maintained profiles.

6. Don't neglect the boring technical details

Your bio should be server-rendered (crawlers read HTML, not JavaScript promises), have a real page title and meta description, and generate a proper preview card when shared in Slack or WhatsApp — that preview is often the first impression. If you'd rather not build all that yourself, it's exactly what whomi.bio does out of the box: SEO-first pages, live proof-of-work widgets and a qualified inbox on a single link.

A 20-minute checklist

Write a one-sentence tagline about what you build (not your title)
Connect GitHub and one other proof-of-work source
Add your three best projects with one-line outcomes
Set a clear contact path
Put the link in your GitHub profile, X bio and resume

That's genuinely it. See how other engineers did it in the directory, or read next: how to rank for your own name on Google.