I was at a conference and ran out of business cards. For a Developer Advocate like me in certain countries, this is a big problem. I normally had only a handful of minutes to impress and convince a developer that I knew what I’m talking about and am a worthy person to follow up with in the future.

I noticed in this country; people do the NFC tap or QR code exchange of contacts when business cards aren’t available. It got me curious about what options were out there, and I discovered I could quickly build a free-ish version quite easily.

I did mine with an iPhone, but assuming Android can export the vcf file, this should work great.

First off, you need to find you contact in the Contacts App. You should find a “Share Contact” button at the bottom, select the specific contact info you want to share (you can even do Note too!), and “Save it files.” This will put it in you iCloud file share, and move over to your laptop.

Grab the file from your iCloud share (your name.vcf) and copy it to someplace on your laptop. I suggest changing the file name to something without a " " in it, like jj_asghar.vcf. Now you need a place to put this file “permanently” online. I have a domain attached to a GitHub repository https://jjasghar.me that I host a simple HTML “shortcut” website, which was a logical place to post this .vcf file.

After getting the file added to my repository, I now have a “permanent” link to https://jjasghar.me/jj_vcard.vcf.

And now all I had to do was create a QRcode to it:

qrencode https://jjasghar.me/jj_vcard.vcf -o ~/Downloads/jjasghar_vcard_github.png

And if I wanted a “tap” share contact, I put that same link into an NFC tag or programmable card, and BOOM (:boom: didn’t seem to work) done! (this is where the “ish” comes into play; you need to purchase these)

FYI: People think you need to program the vCard into the QRcode or NFC, but it’s not; it’s actually a web link to a hosted place. Leveraging something like GitHub for this now you don’t need to pay the monthly or subscription cost for the exact same sharing tech.