Derek has a great post about "having a database": https://sive.rs/dbt

(it's a quick read but essentially he suggests having a sort of minimalist CRM for people you know. Or, as our parents might say: "have a rolodex")

I took this advice to heart and did the following:

- exported all of my LinkedIn connections (about 800 at the time)

- start tagging each one in www.pinboard.in with the "linkedin" tag

- I would add other tags e.g. role_sre, nyc, <companyname>, awesome etc

- I wrote a script to do 30 a day

- Create a custom bookmark that would auto insert the "linkedin" and "role_" tags when I "pinned" a user profile page to save me some typing

- Spent the next couple months tagging each of my connections

I basically had that list for a few months and then one day at work, my manager asks "Do you know any good recruiters in NYC?". A couple clicks in pinboard and I had a list of great NYC recruiters.

I recommended one, they got hired and I got the $10K referral fee.

I then write a custom firefox extension that would highlight in green anyone who was already in my "database". That way if I was looking at the People tag of a company I worked at, it was trivial to see who I should add.