Sneh Duggal
Digital Identity: The CS Student Behind the LinkedIn Profile
When I think about my digital identity, I see a professional side, LinkedIn and GitHub, and a personal side, everything else. On LinkedIn, I’m careful and very professional, for example a co-op experience at the National Research Council of Canada, or research work I did in one of the labs at UVic, projects I’ve built. GitHub is honestly the more interesting one to me, because it’s not really a resume; it’s the evidence for your resume. Anyone can say they know machine learning, but a repo with actual commits and working code says it in a way a bullet point can’t.
My personal accounts are a completely different story. That’s where you’d find me talking about badminton, jiu-jitsu, the fact that I placed top 3 at a UVic poker tournament, or clips of me playing piano at a talent show years ago. None of that is written to impress anyone. It’s just what I’m actually doing with my time outside of school.
The interesting part is that these two versions of me aren’t as separate as I’d like to believe. danah boyd’s idea of context collapse describes this well. For example, I post something for one audience (friends, a poker group chat, my badminton club) with zero thought about who else might eventually see it. But a future employer scrolling through isn’t going to read a poker result the way my friends do; they might read it as a signal about risk tolerance, or just be curious, or not care at all. I don’t get to choose which interpretation lands. That’s the part of digital identity that feels less like something I control and more like something that happens to me after the fact.
This connects to how I think about my personal learning network too. Right now my PLN is mostly informal: classmates I actually talk to about assignments, a couple of people I follow because they post real technical breakdowns instead of surface-level content, and GitHub itself functions like a network since I can see what other students and researchers are actually building. I haven’t been very intentional about it; it’s grown more by accident than by design, which is probably true of my digital identity in general. I’ve been more focused on what I put out.
So my question for the other is this: for those of you who also have a “technical evidence” platform like GitHub, a portfolio, or something similar, do you think of that as part of your professional identity, your PLN, or both?