[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for...
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Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
I see it's common for people on HN to have a personal website/blog.
I'm interested in knowing if the creation and maintenance of a
personal website have lead to paid full/part time jobs, increased
learning, brought new connections to others or are purely vanity.
Author : mdmglr
Score : 262 points
Date : 2023-03-15 06:58 UTC (2 days ago)
| davepeck wrote:
| Given me great joy over the past 23.5 years (!). Given me a place
| to say things that matter to me and maybe nobody else. Oh, and
| kept my mom and dad up-to-date.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Presumably most people that will respond to this post will have
| some sort of interesting occurrence as a result of their blog
| (seeing as that is what is requested by OP). Just to
| counterweight the sampling bias here, I will add that my personal
| website/blog hasn't done much for me professionally. That said,
| it's been great for me personally to have someplace to write
| ideas, experiences, and project write-ups. While I originally
| built it to serve a professional purpose, it really has been nice
| to have a place to essentially journal and write down/flesh out
| ideas (although lots of them are really stupid).
|
| zachbellay.com -- if you're curious
| weka wrote:
| I have been developing https://beta.delaford.com. It's a 2D
| Online JavaScript RPG using TypeScript and HTML <canvas> along
| with Node.js on the backend. It's allowed to me to skip tech
| screenings, use it as an ice-breaker and people always seem to
| love seeing it. Definitely has gotten me a leg up when I use to
| interview.
| housecarpenter wrote:
| Writing my blog (https://thehousecarpenter.wordpress.com/) has
| helped me learn things because it provides me with a concrete
| motivation: instead of having the rather vague and amorphous goal
| of "learn about X", I can think of my goal as "learn enough about
| X to write a blog post about it". That's always been the idea
| behind having the blog, and it's worked decently for that
| purpose. It hasn't helped me at all with my career or with
| connecting with people, but that's unsurprising as I've never
| cared to optimize for those goals.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Plenty of new connections for me and interesting discussions via
| email over the years. Not much in terms of jobs but that's
| expected since it's not really a work oriented blog.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| It has improved my reading and writing skills.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Most often realized benefit of maintaining writeups on projects
| is using them as my own reference when I forget how I did
| something :P
|
| Second most often realized benefit is forcing projects to
| actually get completed. Unless something is clearly a multipart
| adventure, I try to force myself to actually finish the thing
| before writing it up. I enjoy writing things up and documenting
| them, so it's a motivator. I've also decided to put things on my
| site first, rather than bite-size entertainment-for-others posts
| on various sites.
|
| As others have said, it definitely has helped with interviews,
| though I haven't had to do one in a while.
| suchoudh wrote:
| As of today its easier than ever to host your own website and
| still people do not own a personal website.
|
| A memorable URL is something that is much better compared to a
| visiting card. My website design is still oldschool and it keeps
| me grounded as to where I am coming from.
|
| From time to time (like now) I update my one page resume over it
| and thats it.
|
| My website is www.OneLife.in I am amazed why people do not still
| own their own websites particulary as they can easily create one
| using a github account.
|
| A website does not need to have a domain name. A github account
| could suffice. Possibly people are just lazy and possibly scared
| about writing about themselves to strangers.
| mafiaboi wrote:
| Keeping a log and history of my dealings.
|
| Even though the traffic is very limited to my blog - which I
| believe is the case with 99% of personal blogs/websites - going
| back to the blog to write more stuff and reading through old
| posts are useful. It gives you an insight of how you were
| thinking about something else or something that you should care
| about but you forgot to do
| WoodenChair wrote:
| As far as jobs go and the blog--not as much as I would like, but
| more than zero. Despite hundreds of thousands of page views, my
| blog has only yielded me a couple of incoming inquiries about
| jobs over the past decade.[0]
|
| However, it has helped me as a space to write about the launch of
| my books, which probably yielded some sales and has allowed me to
| have some interesting discussions with people about the posts on
| occasion. It's also just cool to have people reading what you
| write.
|
| On the other hand, I think creating a personal "who am I" website
| was helpful in a past job search as a point of reference for
| folks to learn about me and the job search went pretty well.[1]
|
| 0: https://www.observationalhazard.com 1: https://davekopec.com
| nelsonfigueroa wrote:
| My blog over at https://nelson.cloud has helped me get new jobs.
| When I was interviewing for my current job, one of the
| interviewers mentioned that he was happy to see I was running a
| blog. Blogging has also helped me become a better writer and
| reinforce my own knowledge (which is the primary reason why I
| started it).
|
| I keep my blog technical but maybe I'll write about different
| topics in the future. It seems like you can make new connections
| when being more vulnerable on your blog, just based on what I've
| seen from others that are more open online.
| thejarren wrote:
| This is actually pretty fitting, but I had been looking for a new
| job and working to polish my site into a better portfolio. I had
| written a piece about "The Future of Group Messaging" that I had
| worked really hard on, and once I finished it, I posted it on HN,
| fully intending to reach out to recruiters to find work. However,
| it ended up gaining a lot of traction on HN, and from that post,
| I received about 25 inbound job offers that I was able to choose
| from.
|
| I still think back to how stressed I was while building the site,
| and I thought it was such a waste of time. But it got me the job
| I needed at the time and opened a lot of doors for me. That said,
| I could theoretically attribute it to HN and my writing, though
| the custom site helped.
| pwim wrote:
| I started blogging about developer events I was attending in
| Japan back in 2010. As I was the only one writing about it in
| English, the content naturally ranked well.
|
| That led a fellow Canadian to my blog, who asked how I found a
| job here. My email back to him started to get pretty long, and so
| I turned it into an article for the blog.
|
| That article attracted more people looking for developer jobs in
| Japan, so I started collecting their email addresses as I
| occasionally came across developer job opportunities that didn't
| require Japanese.
|
| After about a year of this, I heard a company had made a
| successful hire through the list, and so I started charging
| companies.
|
| From there, the business organically expanded, until I was
| working with many of the major tech companies in Japan.
|
| It's now a business generating a life-changing amount of income.
| It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't of started blogging with no
| real intent other than to share what I was learning.
| XorNot wrote:
| I use it to force myself to write up better notes about how I did
| stuff.
| asicsp wrote:
| Having a blog was one of the recommended marketing strategy for
| ebook promotion, so I started one. Most of deep dives on topics
| I'm familiar already made it to my books, so initially I wrote
| stories around my writing experience.
|
| Then I started a mini section for random stuff like what bug gave
| me trouble. To become more regular, I reused stuff for tips and
| tricks (along with video demos).
|
| I don't use analytics, so don't have numbers to indicate how
| useful it turned out for ebook sales. My friend found one of my
| posts as the top result while searching for a topic, which was
| very satisfying to hear.
| rpdillon wrote:
| Pure vanity, I guess.
|
| In reality, I like writing, and I often go back and read what
| I've written, either to see how my views have changed, or to
| reference previous (technical) work. Putting it on the web is
| mostly a way to make it accessible from anywhere, but also makes
| me put a tiny bit more effort into it, since it is public. I do
| find it to be a continuing source of fun, though!
|
| A side effect is that I occasionally see folks run across
| particular pieces and use them in their own work, which is always
| satisfying.
|
| It's never led to any job-related benefits, and may even be a
| liability, since my site is purely personal adventures...I stay
| away from work topics.
| okaleniuk wrote:
| I do https://wordsandbuttons.online/ as a personal-ish website. I
| don't append my face to every page but a visitor is usually a few
| clicks away from my other works so the site is de-facto more or
| less personal.
|
| First of all, it's a nice hobby. No bullshit programming, no
| frameworks, no dependencies, no annoying editors. I just write my
| code and text and enjoy doing so.
|
| Second, it gives powerful motivation to study. I'm now writing a
| new page on rational interpolation and just yesterday I
| accidentally found a very simple way to avoid the Runge effect. I
| was just playing with interactives and it came out of the blue.
| There is no way I would have learned it otherwise.
|
| Third, it helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning. They
| came to me and proposed to propose them a book on geometry. And
| so I did. The book is called Geometry for Programmers and it's
| coming this summer.
|
| Fourth, I do public lectures (or at least I used to before the
| war), and the audience loves interactive illustrations. So I
| usually turn my site pages into presentation-like pages and do
| lectures with them.
|
| So for me, having a website pays off in multiple ways.
| STLCajun wrote:
| I've had many personal websites over the years, but they all
| eventually get forgotten, and get stale over time... eventually
| getting deleted and replaced when I come up with a new idea or
| want to play with some new web technology.
|
| I think it just comes with the fact that I wasn't really doing
| anything interesting career-wise that a million other people
| haven't done already. However, my fascination with modern AI
| technology has got me ready to start either blogging or possibly
| vlogging again just to open up the discussions and get my
| thoughts and questions out there.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I've had a couple of personal sites over the years starting in
| the late 90s. They have helped me connect with, or get invited
| to, several closed user groups and private forums where I've met
| people with similar research interests I might not otherwise have
| encountered. I write chiefly to help me organise my thinking, and
| publish perhaps only 20% of what I write (the rest I consider
| insufficiently well constituted to put out there).
| nixcraft wrote:
| I have been writing a blog since 2000 and have made many friends
| all around the world. I still get comments and emails about
| topics I post on nixCraft[0]. But, most important, I learned a
| lot from those comments and emails. It also helped me build
| social media following[1][2] just for lulz. I recommend writing a
| blog with your own domain and server that you control.
|
| [0] https://www.cyberciti.biz
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/nixcraft
|
| [2] https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft
| xena wrote:
| Your blog has been invaluable to me over the years. I search it
| for dumb linux things before the Arch wiki. Keep doing good
| things.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Whenever I google something linux-y, and I see your domain, I
| click. Kudos on the excellent click-bait-less content. Thanks
| for all your contributions to my own career.
| iamwpj wrote:
| Big fan -- keep the good work up!
| averagedev wrote:
| For me, the reason is simply that I like having a blog. Truth be
| told, I have no readers. I only post once in a blue moon, or
| whenever inspiration strikes, so that's to be expected.
|
| A good blog can surely lead to all of what you're mentioning, but
| personally I wouldn't get into blogging with high expectations of
| any such benefit.
|
| https://elton.dev
| lapcat wrote:
| 1) My blog is self-documentation. Countless times I've referred
| back to my own blog about some technical issue that I
| investigated at some point in the past.
|
| 2) Other people have found my blog posts useful, for the same
| reason as 1, and have told me so.
|
| 3) As an indie developer, my blog has been helpful in promoting
| my own software.
| bilater wrote:
| For me it's more of a diary that catalogues all my projects, but
| I've also had people reach out for with job/colab opportunities
| after checking it out: https://www.hackyexperiments.com/
| eatonphil wrote:
| Not massive for connections (Twitter interactions are better for
| that) and not great for jobs directly (I've had 2 people in 8
| years contact me about contract work [i.e. not even full time]
| that I was not advertising about based on posts).
|
| The most use I get out of my blog in retrospect is that it has a
| decent amount of minimal working sample code/configuration and I
| reference these snippets frequently.
|
| But writing itself is part of making sure I understand a concept.
| So it's not just about the retrospective view but also about what
| you can learn by not just hacking on stuff but also explaining it
| in writing.
| orsenthil wrote:
| Helped to me reflect into my areas of interests, interests that
| changed over time, interests that remained, and helped me reflect
| or realize on my core values as a person. I wrote for myself most
| of time. I spun off some projects[1] based on repetitive patterns
| I had seen in my blog.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/orsenthil/fortune-browser-extension
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| It's actually a really hard time for indie bloggers, but I still
| think you should do it.
|
| I've been blogging for years. I've had a handful of posts go
| Twitter-viral and/or make the front page of HN, but most of what
| I write feels like it's just talking into the void.
|
| That said, the benefits are numerous. When I'm looking for a gig,
| I can point people to my writing. When I'm hiring folks, I can
| point people to my writing. It gives them a genuine window into
| how I think about the world. It's one thing to say that you do X,
| Y, and Z. It's much more credible to point to a blog post you've
| put out into the world that says you do X, Y and Z, and explains
| how and why you do it.
|
| The other benefits are more personal. It helps me clarify and
| structure my thinking. It also helps me remember how I thought
| about a problem when I want to revisit it in the future, to see
| how/whether my thinking has evolved or deteriorated.
|
| So if you're going to write because you think you'll magically
| get an audience and/or numerous job offers, you'll be
| disappointed. If you write because it's beneficial to you, the
| rest might happen and if it does it'll be a cherry on top.
| jsejcksn wrote:
| A blog might also simply be a contribution to readers --
| distilling insights which required considerably more time to
| acquire than might be spent consuming their documentation.
| markshead wrote:
| Back in the early 2000s I had a blog where I would try to post
| multiple times each week. While I wasn't a poor writer before, it
| was amazing how much I learned about overcoming writers block and
| being able to quickly get ideas from my head into a text file.
| (https://www.productivity501.com)
|
| Later I had a blog post answering some key questions about Agile
| on a different site. That post didn't get much attention, but it
| was a good exercise in articulating part of what I'm trying to
| convey when coaching software engineering teams.
| (https://blogs.harvard.edu/markshead/what-is-agile/)
|
| After reworking the post into a concise PDF, I sent it to a few
| people at a potential client. Later, after I had been awarded a
| contract, I found that the PDF had gotten emailed around within
| the organization and many people knew me as the "guy who wrote
| that PDF about Agile."
|
| I then took the contents of the PDF and reworked it as a script
| for an animation that I posted to YouTube. That video now has 2.7
| million views and has given me quite a bit of recognition in the
| industry...or at least recognition of the cartoon version of me.
| I hear he is much better looking anyway.
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9QbYZh1YXY)
|
| I think took the general ideas from the blog post, the paper, and
| the video and put it together in a book that I generally give
| away like business cards to potential clients.
| (https://www.amazon.com/Starting-Agile-Finding-Your-Path/dp/1...)
|
| The practice of writing on a blog has been key to my career, even
| though a lot of the benefits are a bit indirect and not something
| people would recognize from the outside.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| got me job opportunities multiple times
|
| https://gourav.io/blog
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| jack shit
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| When I run into a problem I need to solve, I will document it on
| my blog and hope Google will surface it to others having a
| similar issue. I also like to document my backpacking and
| climbing trips. There's no real theme. I write for fun and
| there's no contact information so it's never led to a job or
| anything like that.
|
| Doing OSS on Github or Tweeting leads to more business
| opportunities in my mind.
| lethain wrote:
| I've been blogging for about 16 years. Writing is an underrated
| way to cement what you learn any given day or year, and over time
| has made it possible to reach into any part of the industry and
| get an actual response. Writing is particularly powerful in
| combination with actually doing things that (are perceived to)
| matter; the credibility from doing both is much higher than doing
| either.
|
| Concretely answering the questions asked:
|
| 1. At various points I spent a lot of time maintaining, but now
| it's just a static blog deployed via Github Actions onto a Github
| Page. I haven't done any meaningful changes in a few years, and
| the changes are for fun, not necessity
|
| 2. I got my first job in tech thanks to blogging:
| https://lethain.com/datahub/
|
| 3. My blogging has made it possible to write two pretty
| successful books: https://staffeng.com/book/ and
| https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle (working on a third
| now)
|
| 4. Hard to assess, but I believe I've been able to subtly but
| meaningfully advance the technology industry through my writing
| :-)
|
| 5. A significant majority of folks are unaware that I write, and
| that's great! I don't think impact depends on folks connecting
| their colleague to the writer or whatnot
| benclauss wrote:
| Your writing is awesome! I have followed your blog for a while
| now and have recommended it to my team.
| corysama wrote:
| > Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your
| thinking is.
|
| - Dick Guindon
| kanyethegreat wrote:
| Love your writing, Will. Have both of your books!
| dev_0 wrote:
| [dead]
| precompute wrote:
| I like how you have no filler or cruft on your blog posts, and
| jump straight to the topic. I went on a "binge" of your blog a
| year and half ago and left with a lot of actionable advice.
| Thank you!
| jrumbut wrote:
| I don't maintain much anymore, but one of the key lessons I
| learned very early in my career is that having _anything_ in
| public (a link blog, a github where you post a tutorial you 've
| done, a class project online, a quick YouTube tutorial) will put
| you instantly ahead of some really substantial percentage of the
| population who have nothing to show.
|
| Back in the days of yore when I did it this put you ahead of
| 50-60% of new graduates. It's less now, but I review internship
| applications and a good 30% still give me nothing tangible I can
| look at.
|
| So if you happen to be in the 30%, the best thing you can do (and
| it's so quick) is to put anything at all related to your
| professional development online. Go through a tutorial, post the
| results, and briefly write up your thoughts on it.
|
| Congratulations, you just skipped 30% of the line for your first
| job in an evening of work.
| hjr265 wrote:
| When I first created my website (https://hjr265.me) several years
| ago it was mostly a placeholder for the domain that matched my
| preferred handle/username.
|
| Ever since I started the 100DaysToOffload challenge, I have been
| writing a bit more frequently on my personal blog:
| https://hjr265.me/blog/.
|
| Apart from it being a writing excersie, I have been forced to
| look at my own work more critically before presenting them on the
| Internet.
|
| I now find it more important to understand new concepts in-depth,
| as I learn them, so that I can explain them better.
|
| I think about learning things that are beyond what I need for my
| regular work.
|
| And, yes, I admit that I have used my blog at least once to vent
| about something.
| eugene2010 wrote:
| I've been profiling local and independent coffee shops in the
| metro Atlanta area on the website and blog for about five years.
| This project has allowed me to build relationships with coffee
| shop owners, baristas, and coffee enthusiasts in the city. It's
| been rewarding to be able to engage with this passionate
| community (via the newsletter/blog) but also via in-person events
| such as a coffee crawl I recently organized and led.
|
| Although the topic of coffee / coffee shops is niche, writing
| about the places I visit, I am able to touch upon my diverse set
| of interests (art, photography, technology, design, reading,
| writing, general curation, psychology, philosophy, history, etc.)
| wannabebarista wrote:
| Really neat! I was a daily customer to One Cafe in the Flatiron
| building downtown for a few years. Big fan of their cold brew
| (before it was widely available).
| prithsr wrote:
| Though it hasn't done anything for me as of late, in my senior
| year of undergrad I bought a domain name from a random person
| online ($70). I had no actual experience or understanding of web
| development, and thought this would be a good excuse to learn (in
| hindsight, I should have purchased a domain name for
| significantly less money, but having something set-up already
| felt like a 'win'; this was a ~big investment at the time).
|
| I learnt about WordPress, HTML, basic CSS, and consistently wrote
| blog posts focused on tech in general (nothing technical - more
| along the lines of new gadgets, apps, useful software). Flash
| forward to being about to graduate and looking for jobs back
| home, I was asked to submit some work as proof of knowledge (this
| position wasn't necessarily geared to "entry-level", but at least
| I had something to demonstrate my limited experience). In my
| interviews, I was asked about this blog a lot - how it started,
| what I've done, my knowledge of SEO concepts and so on, and I
| strongly believe it's the main reason I was hired.
| colinroper wrote:
| Posting because most of the comments I read had a strong positive
| bias and I have a more lukewarm assessment.
|
| tl;dr: I wouldn't suggest starting a blog for the purpose of
| getting some external benefit (e.g. receiving a job opportunity).
| But if you believe you'll get an internal benefit and you feel
| that benefit is worth the time investment then go for it.
|
| Background: I started my blog "On Product, Tech, & Leadership"
| (https://blog.colinroper.com/) about 4 years ago to help me
| crystallize my thinking on Product Management and Leadership
| topics that I've learned over my career, and with the hope that
| it would help lead to future career opportunities.
|
| So far it has yet to provide any meaningful external benefits
| (from what I'm able to tell). The site hasn't garnered much of a
| following or feedback, despite some modest marketing on LinkedIn.
| I suppose this is the fate of most blogs, though maybe my luck
| will change at some point. The blog has also has been a large
| time investment (in doses) to write the content, create the site,
| tweak the designs, and promote the occasional new posts.
|
| That said, it has provided internal benefits. It has helped me
| clarify my thinking on some topics I care about. And despite not
| liking the act of writing, I have gotten better at it. Further,
| the time sink has been somewhat by choice: I have willingly gone
| deep into coding and design topics as an excuse to grow my skill
| set.
|
| So I would propose the following as a litmus test if you're
| considering starting your own blog: if nobody read your blog
| would it still be worth it to you? I'm a sample size of one, so
| maybe this questions is unfair. Or maybe your situation is
| different and you have a captive audience ready to consume. But I
| hope my experience helps someone make the right choice :)
| sunir wrote:
| I created MeatballWiki. We ended up helping Wikipedia launch. I
| am responsible for the barn stars and the [[free link]] syntax.
|
| I thought peer to peer social software was my future. I was going
| to speak at O'Reilly p2pcon September 23, 2001 in Washington DC.
| Well that didn't happen thanks to 9/11.
|
| So unemployed after the bust I got into a masters program in
| Toronto to extend my ideas from MeatballWiki.
|
| I met the love of my life and married her later. I got a job
| running marketing at FreshBooks and went hard into SaaS
| partnerships.
|
| From there I created the Cloud Software Association and the SaaS
| Connect conference. Now I have my own startup AppBind to solve
| partnership problems.
|
| So, not much.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I do not have a personal brand, but I've had a blog at the same
| URL since 2000 or so. Early on, it connected me to other bloggers
| and writers, and gave me a creative outlet. It has had a few
| incarnations, but it's now a commonplace book, so the value it
| provides is as a searchable archive of excerpted text. It's been
| useful hundreds of time for finding the right quote or passage to
| complete or ornament a thought.
| tricky wrote:
| There is an extensive network of caves under my city that were
| used by beer breweries in the 1800's to store beer. They are all
| but inaccessible, and, at the time, kind of a myth. Most people
| didn't believe they still existed. I was fascinated by this and I
| compiled as much information as I could find on my personal
| website in the early 2000's. One day I received an email, "do you
| want to go into the caves? I know someone who can get us in. Meet
| us at 1am at XXXXXX - bring flashlights, old boots, and $50 to
| pay the tour guide."
|
| Me, being young and always up for an adventure, showed up and it
| was awesome. These were legit spelunker urban explorers who knew
| how to pick locks. We got into the caves and it was crazy. Best
| part is I didn't get murdered.
| tomwheeler wrote:
| As soon as I read this, I knew it was St. Louis.
|
| A former co-worker used to have a shop on Cherokee Street about
| 15 years ago. He told me that a neighboring building had access
| to the caves through the basement, though its owner was too
| afraid to explore it.
| tricky wrote:
| Could that have been across from what is now Earthbound Beer?
| If so, they hand-dug all the debris out of the cave and you
| can pretty easily get a tour. The owner said the cave under
| the cave is off limits b/c they almost ran out of air while
| exploring it.
| simonmales wrote:
| From my local cave clan:
|
| When it rains, no drains.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Did you document any part of it on your blog? Or was it just a
| personal memory for you alone? Either way, fucking dope.
| tricky wrote:
| i did. It is really old so the writing is very cringe...
| search cherokee cave tour and my username to find it.
| pncnmnp wrote:
| I found it!
|
| It's not cringy - I thoroughly enjoyed it! Out of
| curiosity, were you able to verify the firefighter story?
|
| Edit: I've removed the link.
| tricky wrote:
| Glad you enjoyed it!
|
| And, no, i never did verify the firefighter story.
| pncnmnp wrote:
| So, I looked into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's archive
| (1874 to present) in the hope of solving this mystery,
| but could not find anything. However, I did find a rather
| fascinating article titled "A Morning in the Cave" that
| was published on 28 July 1996. If anyone is affiliated
| with an academic institution, they can read it on
| ProQuest.
|
| There is a free OCR version available here:
|
| Page 7: https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/142619929/?te
| rms=%22cher...
|
| Unfortunately, I could not find the page 8 clipping on
| newspapers.com.
|
| Edit: I found the page 8 clipping -
| https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25694845/the-world-
| beneath-1...
|
| It looks like this was part of a larger Sunday piece
| titled "The World Beneath". You can find all six
| clippings on r22tycoon's newspapers.com account at https:
| //www.newspapers.com/clippings/?user=4850847%3Ar22tyco...
| tricky wrote:
| what? this is amazing, I haven't seen that article. I was
| just able to pull the article's text up for free via the
| St. Louis County Library. Thank you! if I figure out how
| to find individual pages, i will let you know.
| washywashy wrote:
| Cincinnati?
| tricky wrote:
| are there caves there? seems like a road trip is in order
| [deleted]
| Aperocky wrote:
| > Best part is I didn't get murdered.
|
| I was almost going to say this sounds crazy dangerous and more
| like a trap, but 15 years ago I would have done the same and
| probably came out safe.
|
| I don't know what changed, it feels like things are getting
| more dangerous, but unsure if it's perception, or the truth.
| rconti wrote:
| Perception (maybe you just have more information!), and
| having more to lose, personally, as you get older.
| pc86 wrote:
| "Things" are objectively not more dangerous, in fact quite
| the opposite.
| dataqat wrote:
| Overall things are much safer, but contact by scammers
| online (online scams in general) is much more a thing now
| than it was then. There was a turning point in the mid-late
| aughts for me where the level of trustworthiness of random
| anonymous online contacts took a dive.
| sbussard wrote:
| Sounds like a sad story. I'm sorry to hear that
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Over-the-Rhine?
| turrican wrote:
| Is this also a thing in Cinci?
| mrleinad wrote:
| > Best part is I didn't get murdered.
|
| Pretty important if you ask me
| pvaldes wrote:
| Great opportunity of a viral video and digital glory and fame
| missed by not becoming murdered just a little, you, lazy
| alive being. Fake it at least with some homemade ketchup. The
| algorithm says: booring, you need to commit more with the
| channel.
|
| ;-)
|
| My old blog was all for laughs, vanity and stupid terminal
| tricks. Not much lost.
| abhaynayar wrote:
| It's amazing how I'd never heard the word "spelunk" before
| today, and now in the span of the last few hours, I've heard it
| multiple times in three different contexts.
| wnolens wrote:
| It's the word I use for exploring unfamiliar (and potentially
| scary) parts of a codebase
| gabereiser wrote:
| I take it you don't play video games either. Spelunky was a
| pretty popular Indy game back in the day. Named after, you
| guessed it, spelunking. I first learned the word from "Where
| in the world is Carmen Sandiego" back in the 90s. I had to
| ask my parents what it meant.
| luizs wrote:
| There's also an old NES game called Spelunker.
| airstrike wrote:
| First time I heard it in English! Your comment made me want
| to dig deeper... It looks like it comes from the Latin
| "spelunca", meaning "cave"
|
| Curiously, in Portuguese we have "espelunca" which is more
| commonly used as a synonym for a seedy, shady place -- and
| now I know why!
| throwwwaway69 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion#Working_Mem.
| ..
| DeathArrow wrote:
| There is a system of subterranean galleries under my city also.
| It's closed to the public and I planned some time ago with some
| guys to explore a part of it. We were too lazy to do it and now
| I regret it a bit.
| ilyt wrote:
| >Me, being young and always up for an adventure, showed up and
| it was awesome. These were legit spelunker urban explorers who
| knew how to pick locks. We got into the caves and it was crazy.
| Best part is I didn't get murdered.
|
| Sure Cave Murder Tour Guide, sure
| koolba wrote:
| Ha! Only thing missing from this is: " _Bring your own weapons.
| Safety not guaranteed._ "
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I have only done this once before.
| nvarsj wrote:
| It's mostly been useful to capture big things I worked on - the
| exercise of distilling what I did into words really helps make it
| concrete in my brain. Helps a lot when talking about experience
| at job interviews for instance.
|
| Honestly I'd love to blog more but reality is it is a massive
| time sink. Writing is hard, writing technical things in a clear
| and concise way is extra hard. I'm not sure how the regulars
| manage it! A single post can take me 10-20 hours. I'd have to
| sacrifice something else in my life to really spend the time I
| need on it.
| uncertainquark wrote:
| It has helped me become a globally published space exploration
| writer: https://blog.jatan.space/p/my-science-writing-journey
| jppope wrote:
| My site is: https://jonpauluritis.com
|
| There's a bunch of benefits but they're mostly indirect - never
| like generating work or connections. Sometimes, it actually has
| the opposite effect - aka the HN comments can be pretty brutal.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| vladstudio wrote:
| My personal site - [0] - has been an incredible source of the
| emotional stability for more than 20 years. I publish my art
| there in the form of desktop wallpapers, and the positive
| feedback just never stops (knocking on wood).
|
| Whenever I have a problem at work, or feel insecure, I say to
| myself - hey, at least people like my pictures!
|
| [0] https://vlad.studio
| amenghra wrote:
| I started my blog in 1996 [1].
|
| It started slow -- before I even became an engineer. As I grew as
| a software engineer, I started to set aside time specifically to
| write a post. At peak, I was spending ~50h per month writing one
| technical post. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It helped
| improve my thinking and writing skills. Over time, it became
| harder for me to find the time (and content/ideas) so I've
| essentially stopped adding new posts. I keep the site up since it
| doesn't cost me anything beyond the domain name.
|
| I don't have any analytics, so I have no idea how many visitors I
| get. Cloudflare does tell me that they saved me GBs of bandwidth
| every month and mitigated ~10 "events", so I'm guessing there's
| at least a handful of people and hundreds of bots -- hopefully
| enjoying the content.
|
| [1] https://www.quaxio.com/
| qudat wrote:
| My blog is mostly a dev journal which has helped me better think
| about and express my ideas about software development.
|
| It also helped me remove writing blocks because I intentionally
| time-box my posts.
|
| https://bower.sh
| analog31 wrote:
| According to my readers (all zero of them), purely vanity.
| gavinhoward wrote:
| It hasn't done anything for me. Yet.
|
| It _has_ made me known on Hacker News, which I think will pay off
| eventually.
|
| It is weird to be known as the "Zig function colors guy" though.
| errol-hassall wrote:
| It has helped many junior developers in teams I have run perform
| better, become happier and enjoy their job more. Which as a tech
| lead makes my job easier. I tend to write on more junior related
| topics ever since I ran a team of junior developers. I noticed
| they constantly had the same questions and feelings that I did
| when I was a junior. So I began writing on topics with more of a
| junior/entry level focus. This lead to all my team members
| reading them, reaching out to tell me just how much it helped to
| know that their struggle with x,y,z is normal. Ultimately it lead
| to a fantastic development team, a great supportive environment
| and most importantly it made them feel that their tech lead was
| just another developer with the same struggles at one point.
|
| A blog has also made interviews substantially easier, which is
| great.
|
| https://errolhassall.com/
| DLion wrote:
| I've been writing since I was a teenager, opened/closed different
| blogs, this one is my definite one: https://domenicoluciani.com
|
| I didn't earn that much, just a bunch of euros thanks to some
| donations (thank you!)
|
| But the most important things I've gotten from it was:
|
| - Improve my written english skill (I'm not a native english
| speaker)
|
| - Learn how to put my thoughts down, it made me to learn more
| about a specific topic
|
| - Share my thoughts with clients and colleagues, if I need to say
| something multiple times it's really efficient since you can just
| send a link to them.
|
| - Could have been helpful for my CV but I've never had any
| feedback for it during my interviews
| smohnot wrote:
| I have a link to http://sheel.wtf (a public motion page) in my
| twitter bio. I'm surprised at how many people read it and
| reference stuff from it when we talk. I'm often on podcasts and
| it gives the hosts something to talk about. I'm a VC and a few
| founders have mentioned they like knowing about their investors
| as people and mine helps them understand that.
| ethicalsmacker wrote:
| I have a website. I haven't had any tangible benefits from it. I
| keep it mainly for SEO fodder if someone searches my name.
| hnrodey wrote:
| My ManagerREADME has proved quite valuable, although it hasn't
| lead any unsolicited work my way. It's public on my GitHub and I
| include a link to it on my resume.
|
| I've interviewed for several lead/manager roles and virtually all
| interviewers have brought up that they really like my
| ManagerREADME and it gave them great additional insight to me as
| a candidate. In another case, this document was the reason a
| company reached back out to me for an additional manager role
| they created after having originally passed on me for a candidate
| with more relevant work experience.
|
| Overall, I'm quite proud of my creation and it's had direct
| benefit in advancing my career.
|
| Link intentionally omitted.
| azubinski wrote:
| This is a form of self-destruction that helps create the illusion
| of salvation from self-destruction.
|
| For example, BDD (Blog Driven Development). You blog for people
| who don't care what you do, and you only do it because you don't
| care what you do. This is a public imitation of motivation for no
| one and nothing. Well, except that AI owners are happy, more
| human-written texts means more feed for the omnivorous algorithm.
| blueridge wrote:
| https://www.eurozine.com/blogging-the-nihilist-impulse/
| generalizations wrote:
| Definitely got me my current job (sysadmin).
| marcusbuffett wrote:
| I blog at mbuffett.com , personally I just like seeing that
| people are engaging with or learning from my posts. Like whenever
| there's a new release of Bevy, I get hundreds/thousands of people
| reading my snake game tutorial, and that's fulfilling to me, to
| know that I'm helping people. For the more opinion-based posts,
| it's fun to see the discussion on HN, or get emails from people
| agreeing/disagreeing.
|
| I've had 3 blogs now, the first was just for fun, the second was
| because I was told it was "good for my career" in some vague
| sense, and now I'm back to doing it for fun. The one I did for
| vague career reasons had the worst content, and did nothing for
| me. In general I think it's hard to have a blog lead you to jobs,
| but maybe this isn't true if you're blogging about very niche
| stuff.
|
| I kind of object to the "purely vanity" catch-all in the last
| sentence, as if the act of creation has no intrinsic value, so if
| it's not a means to an end, it must be for vanity.
| bovermyer wrote:
| My personal website I see as my legacy. When I die, it will live
| on for awhile, and people can get some use of my life that way.
| hellohihello135 wrote:
| I love this answer. You just convinced me to start a blog.
| iamsanteri wrote:
| Among others, it helped me get a job abroad where I otherwise
| wouldn't have even been considered. This alone due to the lack of
| knowledge of the local language, and the job was in enterprise
| sales... I figured this out way later into the job as someone in
| that startup's leadership was impressed by it!
|
| Overall, I think your blog is a portfolio of sorts.
|
| As one of my friends told me back in the day. "If you can't write
| code, write instead, just write." And if you can do both (i.e.
| write code, as well as interesting, candid and valuable content),
| get your custom server-side rendered blog set up and start typing
| like so many others here on HN! :)
|
| EDIT: Just like someone else mentioned here, I've also been
| featured on the front page of Hacker News and it heated up my
| Droplet VPS server quite a bit. Vanity all the way it is, haha!
| eric_khun wrote:
| I live in Taiwan and try to run some beach volleyball games. It's
| not common here, and not easy to find players. Writing this
| article[1] helped me to recruit constantly new players (it ranks
| 1st/2nd in Google).
|
| Sometimes I write about things I want people know about Taiwan
| like their bike-sharing system[2], semiconductors[3], or simply
| good food in Taiwan[4].
|
| Sometimes, I write about tech stuff, like kubernetes cpu
| limits[5] or blockchain consensus[6].
|
| I thought about focusing in a single topic, but when people
| reaches me out, like today[7] about my food post, it reminds me
| that it is fine, and make me quite happy that I helped one soul
| out there.
|
| [1] https://erickhun.com/posts/volleyball-and-beach-
| volleyball-i...
|
| [2] https://erickhun.com/posts/taiwan-youbike-bike-sharing/
|
| [3] https://erickhun.com/posts/world-innovation-taiwan-
| semicondu...
|
| [4] https://erickhun.com/posts/taipei-restaurants/
|
| [5] https://erickhun.com/posts/kubernetes-faster-services-no-
| cpu...
|
| [6] https://erickhun.com/posts/explaining-blockchains-to-
| develop...
|
| [7] https://imgur.com/a/m06CQYd
| dkuntz2 wrote:
| nothing. it brings me joy though.
| dend wrote:
| Been blogging for more than a decade on my own site
| (https://den.dev).
|
| 1. Got my break in the tech industry thanks to a blog post on
| some reverse engineering tinkering I've been doing.
|
| 2. On multiple occasions, I ended up searching online for a
| problem only to land on a blog post I wrote years ago, so I use
| it as my own reference every once in a while.
|
| 3. Connected to a network of folks in the companies I've worked
| at (and continue to work in) thanks to blog posts where I tinker
| with APIs and all sorts of random stuff ("Oh yeah - I've seen
| that blog post before.") that I wouldn't run into otherwise.
|
| 4. Got way better at writing and expressing my thoughts clearly,
| especially when it comes to more technical topics, thanks to
| having a public forcing function.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| To my direct knowledge? Nothing. Except for practice.
|
| Even after graduating college I found it challenging to write
| anything more than a page long. Not to say I couldn't write, I
| was just very brief about it and often didn't fully explain my
| ideas. Lots of assumptions in what others would "get". Also
| writing even that 1 page would be pulling teeth.
|
| A decade or so of pushing myself to write about anything and
| everything, it's become much easier. I still have challenges
| getting started, when I've been on writing break for a while. But
| when I do "Get going" it flows much easier and at a much greater
| length.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| https://will.institute
|
| I don't really use it actively, but it helped me feel better
| about deleting my instagram account. I moved all the old posts
| over and now they still exist somewhere public but not on a
| social network.
|
| Static site built with Publish, so it was some fun Swift practice
| outside of the apple-platforms bubble.
| https://github.com/JohnSundell/Publish
|
| Other than that, not really. But I haven't tried to get anything
| else out of it.
| LoulouMonkey wrote:
| This is my first post on HN, though I've been reading
| conversations here for years.
|
| I would encourage the OP to create their own website and share it
| with their friends and workmates.
|
| I went through a similar journey in 2020 and all I can say is
| that I wished I had done it sooner. I started writing articles
| when the pandemic hit, and bought a domain / published my
| articles there last year.
|
| Reason for doing so was an overall lack of confidence in many
| things:
|
| - Lack of confidence in my written English
|
| - I had just changed jobs, leaving a technical role for a non-
| technical one. As I had joined a technical team as a Data Program
| Manager, I was afraid that my new workmates would have zero
| respect for me if they thought I was unable to do their job
|
| Almost two years later, my personal website has gotten me some
| job offers through LinkedIn, and most importantly it has helped
| me feel more integrated within my new team. I'm writing "feel",
| because I have no evidence that I wouldn't have been accepted or
| respected if I hadn't had my website.
|
| My English is still pretty bad, my technical skills are even
| worse. But I really see this website as a confidence booster for
| anything I do.
|
| For those who might be interested: http://blanchardjulien.com
|
| Thanks for reading!
| wgj wrote:
| Your written English is good! Good blog too.
| dr_kiszonka wrote:
| People with blogs, don't you feel worried that you might get
| something wrong in your posts, which will bite you in the behind
| during recruitment processes? (That, and time commitment are the
| primary reasons I don't blog.)
| eztof wrote:
| Honestly, if a potential employer turns me down based on
| something written in my blog, I'd say I dodged a bullet.
| agilob wrote:
| Would you write a blog post about it?
| devtailz wrote:
| My favourite win of my development blog is stopping myself from
| doing the same project multiple times. I used to tinker a lot,
| but wouldn't document anything and so I often had to start all
| over when I picked that project back up.
|
| Writing forces me to break things down into manageable chunks.
| I've seen much more consistent progress this way.
|
| https://devtails.xyz
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I started my blog on August 24, 2004, posting multiple times
| daily, and I continue to do so because I enjoy it.
|
| It's a way of seeing what I think.
|
| I get about 500 page views/day (down from around 10,000
| visitors/25,000 page views/day around 2010-2012).
|
| My Comments section since the beginning has always been
| completely open: no login required; no delay; no editing; no
| moderation.
|
| I'm one of VERY few bloggers today with completely open,
| unmoderated comments: I get about 10/week, which lets me
| respond/interact to each one if I want.
|
| Bonus: EVERY comment goes on my homepage at the top of my
| Comments section the moment it appears along with the commenter's
| handle -- it's one way to get a tiny measure of internet fame
| cheap.
|
| I haven't changed my blog's appearance apart from tweaking image
| size since I started.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Hey, I'm one of the 500, not to mention an early Youtube
| subscriber. Your blog is charming and you post good links,
| everybody should check it out.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| How are you not blown up with spam comments?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Even when I had 25,000 page views daily, I'd only get a
| couple spam comments/day, easily deleted, no big deal.
|
| Now I get about one every 1-2 months.
| weavie wrote:
| I guess times have changed. About 10 years ago I was
| getting hundreds per day.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this. Updated my beliefs on spam volume
| for small sites. And I don't see why your site would be
| different from others, so this new belief is very reusable!
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Try it for yourself and see your handle on my home page.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I'll give it a go! (And just in case some sarcasm or
| something came across, my last comment was sincere.)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| No worries, FWIW I didn't -- and still don't -- note any
| sarcasm....
| pknerd wrote:
| Been blogging since 2003 but my current blog helped me to learn
| new stuff, gigs, jobs, Ads, affiliate and guest blogging earning.
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| So I have a few different experiences:
|
| 1. I used to write technical pieces on Medium aimed mostly at
| people starting out their careers. I suddenly blew up and made
| reasonable money from it for a little while and that blog (before
| and after blowing up) was a big factor in me landing both
| consultancy jobs and a full-time job.
|
| 2. I now write almost exclusively on my personal website
| (https://yakkomajuri.com). I get no money out of it and few
| people read what I write, with the exception of some posts
| getting on the front page here once in a while.
|
| It's fantastic: I've kept up with my love of writing and have
| allowed myself to just write about anything, including pieces
| that show a lot of vulnerability. This culminated in me
| publishing some poems a couple weeks ago (in Portuguese though).
|
| Beyond that, my website is super bespoke, using a static site
| generator I built, and it's vanilla HTML/JS/CSS. It's refreshing
| to write dumb code with almost no deps. I also learn a lot
| through building it and writing on it, and have expanded it to
| include different areas of interest (pictures for example).
| Overall, it just _feels good_ to have it.
|
| Ah, I've also started to write goals publicly which has been a
| nice experience too.
| simonw wrote:
| I've been blogging for nearly 21 years. It's done so much for me.
|
| - Got me jobs. I'd estimate more than half of the significant
| jobs I've had in my life came about through relationships that
| had originated with people getting to know my work through my
| blog.
|
| - Speaking engagements. I used my blog to bootstrap a bunch of
| these, to the point that I've spoken at well over 100 events.
|
| - Invitations to interesting meetings. Most recently, my writing
| about AI has gotten me invited to some really interesting in-
| person meetups in the Bay Area.
|
| - Media appearances! I've been on radio and TV a few times now
| thanks to things I've written on my own blog.
|
| It's also just really rewarding to have somewhere I can post
| content that entirely belongs to me.
|
| I posted this when I hit the 20 year mark with a whole bunch of
| highlights: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jun/12/twenty-years/
| theroo wrote:
| Was going to page you. Ctrl-F for simonw, and you beat me to
| it. Love your writing.
| froggertoaster wrote:
| Provided an outlet for some thoughts, mainly.
| ripley12 wrote:
| Just having a portfolio of projects on my website makes some job
| interviews a _lot_ easier; some interviewers ditch their script
| and start asking questions about my portfolio projects.
|
| I also find it rewarding to maintain and develop the website. I
| started out small with a generic Hugo template, and over the
| years I've rewritten the whole thing one small commit at a time.
| It's been a good learning opportunity, and it's nice to have a
| low-stakes project where I can do anything I want. If I want to
| add a silly feature I just do it.
| markshead wrote:
| There are few better ways to increase your learning on a
| technical topic than to write a post about it and get lucky
| getting traction on HN. I wrote a post on State Machines a few
| years ago and the feedback I got from the HN community was
| incredible in helping me refine the post and deepen my
| understanding of the topic.
|
| (https://blog.markshead.com/869/state-machines-computer-scien...)
| vegancap wrote:
| It actually got me my current job. An investor found my blog on
| Go microservices, and was looking for someone with some
| experience around that to help get his product/platform off the
| ground. I worked on it part-time for a couple of years, then when
| I got made redundant late last year, I got the chance to work on
| it full-time. And I absolutely love it.
|
| Asides from that, it improved my written communication skills, my
| ability to constrain ideas and concepts down to the bare minimum.
| I took it down recently as the content was old and the website
| needed updating, and I got requests from folks in India, China
| and Russia requesting me to put it back up again because they use
| it as a reference. I even found out it had been translated into
| Mandarin, and was shared a lot around Chinese tech blogs. It blew
| my mind. It wasn't some huge effort to make really, but it had a
| big impact on lots of people trying to learn Go and
| microservices. I wish I had time to revamp it and do some more,
| but sadly not these days!
| ironSkillet wrote:
| I used my blog to display a portfolio of projects I had worked on
| to prepare myself for leaving academia and go into industry. It
| paid off massively, as a random linkedin recruiter saw the flashy
| looking web viz I built (an utter pile of garbage html and D3)
| and I got a job at a hedge fund, leading me to a very lucrative
| career trajectory.
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| My website is pure vanity but I sometimes write brief reviews of
| books on my blog. Once I was contacted by a publisher offering to
| send me a hardback copy of a new book from an author I had
| previously written nice things about. I accepted and wrote a
| review of the new book[0] - sadly I didn't enjoy it as much as
| the first.
|
| Before you accuse me of selling out for a free book, I would like
| everyone to know that I totally sold out for a free book and I
| would do so again.
|
| [0] https://sheep.horse/2018/5/book_-
| _making_the_monster_by_kath...
| AdamCraven wrote:
| It gets you more of whatever you love doing - even if no one
| reads it - because you get better at whatever you write about.
|
| If you knew no one would ever read your writing, would you still
| write it? If yes (the likelihood is no one will read it apart
| from your future teammates) you'll have found your subject.
|
| It can give you jobs, learning & connections, but it also takes
| time. Time that can be used for other things that could get you
| the jobs, learning & connections you want without writing.
| There's no one way to approach it, you need to find what works
| for you.
|
| For me - I've written a lot (mostly as principles), but only
| recently I've focused on learning how to write, which meant I
| needed a blog to write on and a way to make it fun for me (
| https://principles.dev/blog/first-principles-thinking-a-visu...)
| unxdfa wrote:
| I had a fairly extensive personal web site for a number of years
| used as a professional profile. Unfortunately someone I met on a
| dating app turned out to be a bit of a psychopath and I had to
| pretty much cut her off. She managed to find the web site on the
| public Internet and get in contact with me directly and caused me
| a lot of problems leading to me having to dispose of the web
| site, the domain, my phone number and update lots of professional
| contacts.
|
| I prefer a lot of anonymity now. I don't have any social media
| profiles or public facing stuff. And you know what? It has done
| no harm whatsoever to my professional life or connections. All
| that stuff that sucks you in is 100% optional.
| neom wrote:
| Mostly I'd be pretty annoyed at myself if I didn't know how to
| deploy a basic website anymore. Keeps me young :|
| DustinBrett wrote:
| When I was a kid in the late 90's making a personal website was
| my motivation to learn programming. In my 20's it was my blog
| while I traveled around the world, which I used as a way to
| communicate with my family and friends. Now in my 30's it's
| helped me excel my career in web/software development as I have
| turned it into a side project to build a desktop environment in
| the browser.
|
| Feel free to check it out: https://dustinbrett.com/
| ripley12 wrote:
| I really like your website, well done.
| [deleted]
| steveridout wrote:
| This blog post of mine hit HN and led to Duolingo's CTO and co-
| founder offering me a job back in 2016:
| https://steveridout.com/2016/01/04/readlang-3-years-as-a-one...
|
| I joined them shortly after and a year later I sold Readlang to
| them. In 2021 Duolingo IPO'd and I'm now financially independent,
| which may not have happened if not for writing about it on my
| personal blog.
|
| (Oh, and I really ought to write another blog post about buying
| Readlang back from Duolingo last month!)
| goldfeld wrote:
| This is encouraging, as someone starting both a personal blog
| and a newsletter about language learning in chinese[1], I hope
| a blog is an easier path into an audience than the competitive
| lang app market.
|
| [1]: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/the-sound-of-
| encroaching-...
| yabones wrote:
| I started my blog because I have a shitty memory, I could never
| remember exactly how I did things last week/month/year. Over
| time, it went from a crutch to a superpower. Now, I don't just
| remember what format to put foo.conf or what commands to empty
| the queue for bar.service -- I have the exact context, outcome,
| and all the things I tried to make it work. Between my 'long
| form' blog posts and my more 'wiki-like' notes site, I've
| basically documented everything that I _know_ over the past
| decade or so.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| I want to have this available for easy remembering how is done,
| "here is how", the rest can watch.
|
| This is a perfectly good reason to blog. Maybe the most
| fundamental.
|
| Useful not only for software tech stuff.
| zaphar wrote:
| Technically it started my career. I was doing stuff with code and
| blogging about it and a recruiter found my blog and put me in the
| pipeline for my first Full time job. This was a long time ago but
| it did it's job at the time. There were a few things that helped
| my blog get noticed.
|
| 1. I was coding in public. (Lesson: Be transparent)
|
| 2. I was working in a language that was starting to vanish which
| meant that there were fewer people writing about it like me.
| (Lesson: Find a niche)
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Almost every job (fulltime and contract) that I've had was due to
| someone reading an article on my site and then asking me if i'd
| like a job.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Landed a co-founder position after writing about something topic
| relative, after an intro from someone in my network. Was
| contacted by a big tech recruiter on linkedin after seeing my
| blog and ended up with a great job.
| rootsudo wrote:
| I run several blogs.
|
| 1. Tech posts and personal experiences. I've been reached out to
| for custom projects and can bill pretty well. My work sells
| itself and the interview/introductory phone call usually is just
| to make sure scope makes sense and velocity/speed to complete. It
| is nothing unique or unusual, just routine stuff that ranks high
| on google SEO.
|
| 2. I post about my travel. I get people that email me and I can
| sometimes meetup like minded people that enjoy similar hobbies.
| One of a cycling blog, mostly in Asia and West Coast USA. Sure
| there are facebook groups for cities, but I've been pleasantly
| surprised at the people that found it.
|
| 3. Related to travel, just random restaurants and opinions/talk
| pieces. Sometimes grocery store photos and things that are for
| sale in A but never can be in B. Nothing interesting from this
| one, unfortunately except that people suggest I should just put
| it on instagram. Great filler for conversation if I don't want to
| express my _Tech_ background.
|
| The tech site is great, because my main email which is my name,
| is the websites domain, so people always take a curiosity glance.
| It doesn't fully weigh in on a standard job application, but it
| does count as _passion._
|
| I question if it's really passion, I've just enjoyed breaking
| stuff and fixing it, and I've documented what I do simply because
| why not - I wanted to really see how many hours I spend on a
| computer being productive.
| BrentOzar wrote:
| Mine started as a personal blog, and now generates $2M USD/year
| revenue of training, consulting, and online services.
|
| I regularly preach the gospel of, "Find the most expensive thing
| in your business, stand next to that, offer to help fix it when
| it breaks, and blog about what you've learned."
|
| For me, that was Microsoft SQL Server, but the specific tech
| doesn't matter. Follow the money.
| jmclnx wrote:
| To me it is like shouting in the wind in a public park. I am not
| concerned about who sees it, but it will out last me :)
| bachmeier wrote:
| I'm a US academic, so there's not much choice but to have a
| website. It has definitely led to increased learning and new
| connections. Hard to say for sure, but I suspect it has opened
| some side opportunities.
|
| I'd have a website even if it provided none of the above. Think
| about how good it feels to have a deep conversation with someone
| on a topic you love. That's what it feels like to write for my
| website. And in 2023, the cost is basically zero.
| benwerd wrote:
| I've been blogging since 1998 and can trace every major step
| forward in my career to my blog.
|
| In 2003 I started writing about social networking and education -
| the replies to that blog post helped me kickstart my first
| startup.
|
| In 2009 my blog posts about technology ethics led to me giving a
| talk at Harvard, which led to my becoming the first employee at a
| media tech startup.
|
| That in turn led to me learning more about media tech
| accelerators. I applied to one with a new startup idea, and got
| in, in part because my blogging on the open web was picked up by
| the New York Times as part of a story.
|
| Blogging for that startup helped us find customers and a like-
| minded community.
|
| When that startup was acquired, blogging both externally and
| internally at the acquirer helped me make friends and share ideas
| that wouldn't have reached the right people otherwise.
|
| And so on. Sharing ideas - not just tips, but thoughts about the
| _why_ and _who_ behind technology, as well as being vulnerable in
| public - has let me cut through from being a nobody in Edinburgh
| to someone with a pretty great technology career in SF.
|
| And even if none of that had happened, writing is a wonderful way
| to structure your thoughts, consider what really matters, and
| reflect.
|
| I recommend it. Start a blog - on your own domain, on webspace
| that you control.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Edinburgh is a pretty fantastic place to start off, FWIW
| pvaldes wrote:
| Their botanical garden is a very nice place
| benwerd wrote:
| No shade to Edinburgh! I miss it every day. But I'll tell you
| this: there was no startup ecosystem there worth talking
| about in 2003, and a lot of people who would side-eye you and
| tell you to get a real job.
| jjgreen wrote:
| Too polite
| a4isms wrote:
| Way back when Joel Spolsky was a high-profile blogger in the
| "starting your own software business" genre, I asked him for
| advice about my blogging, and he replied "Stop what you're
| doing and get your blog onto your own domain."
|
| I had procrastinated because other platforms made everything so
| damn easy, and hosting my own blog meant being a part-time web
| admin. But I took his advice, and set up http://raganwald.com.
|
| Some years after that, Posterous launched on HN, and I gave it
| a try. It was great, so very convenient! But I carefully kept
| copies of everything I posed there, and sure enough... One day
| it closed its doors, and I republished evrything on
| raganwald.com (some of my urls are
| raganwald.com/posterous/xxxxx.html, this is why).
|
| But what about all the links to the old posterous articles? All
| dead, so some threads right here on HN point to dead URLs. This
| is bad for me and for HN. For this reason, I personally reject
| the strategy of posting on my own domain and republishing it
| simultaneously on some other platform. Everything I write is on
| a domain I control, and if I get less traffic, so be it.
| Running my own blog on my own low-traffic domain is like
| running a store in a building I own. The mall is very
| attractive, but I'm done with landlords.
|
| p.s. There are hosted solutions that respect you your own
| domain. Some are free, like... Github Pages. And that's what I
| use. It is not essential that I own the server, just the URLs.
|
| https://github.com/raganwald/raganwald.github.com
| simonw wrote:
| When I moved my blog to a domain I owned I added little notes
| to my old content saying "Previously hosted on ..." in the
| hope that searches for that content by URL would find the new
| homes.
|
| Example: https://simonwillison.net/2004/Jan/22/defendingWebAp
| plicatio... - at the bottom it says "Previously hosted at htt
| p://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/01/22/defendingWebAppl..."
|
| I just tested it and it works! https://www.google.com/search?
| client=firefox-b-1-d&q=http%3A...
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Very clever, nicely done!
| ludovicianul wrote:
| Any particular reason for emphasising the "own domain
| /control"?
| moneywoes wrote:
| Yep especially compared to substack
| TacoSteemers wrote:
| One reason is that someone else's platform means you don't
| have full control over presentation and discoverability.
|
| Also, at some point in their existence each platform start to
| decline. People move to the next platform and lose some of
| their readers. A few years later the same thing happens
| again, and readership is reduced again.
|
| Personally I have had a lot of fun adding random bits to my
| website such as small tools, some explorations on creative
| expression with CSS and things like that.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If you're a tech person it serves as portfolio piece and
| example of stewardship skill.
| benwerd wrote:
| A blog is a long-term endeavor. You want to be able to run it
| long after any particular platform has declined. Ideally, it
| should be your portfolio that follows you throughout your
| career. That means you should minimize dependencies.
|
| Also: a domain means links add value to your online identity,
| not the platform you happened to choose.
| Vibgyor5 wrote:
| > I recommend it. Start a blog - on your own domain, on
| webspace that you control.
|
| Following up on this - any specific reason behind this? I am
| considering starting a newsletter soon to first gather audience
| and Substack looks like right solution for this without
| requiring much technical setup, esp. as a non-tech. Idea is to
| first start blogging, get into that mindspace, build an
| audience and then you can move it to a proper blog on your own
| website, if required.
|
| Curious what would be your thoughts here?
| nigamanth wrote:
| Whoever you use, Medium, Substack, Wordpress, your blog is in
| their hands. If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can
| take it all away.
|
| You need to control your audience to reduce chances of
| "unforeseen circumstances"
| racl101 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on:
|
| > If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can take it
| all away.
|
| What kinds of tasks? Who's they?
|
| I can see Medium and Substack changing their rules and
| stuff.
|
| But WordPress?
|
| Isn't it controlled entirely by you?
| zerkten wrote:
| >> What kinds of tasks? Who's they?
|
| They is whatever service you are signed up to that is
| outside of your control.
|
| "Takes it all away" I think is really meant to mean a
| multitude of things. At the worst end is the service
| closing down unexpectedly. They may have been impacted by
| a cyberattack, haven't been paying hosting bills, never
| tested backups etc. Your site is under
| something.theirdomain.com and theirdomain.com is sold in
| a fire sale. Your audience can't get to the site and you
| can't redirect them.
|
| More frequently there is an abhorrent change to the
| service from your perspective. Perhaps they start
| inserting ads into your content, charging for previously
| free features, or even repurposing your content per their
| terms that you didn't read when signing up to
| coolservice.com. These kinds of changes are more
| insidious. On the lowest end, they may just change their
| system to be a worse experience for you with some new
| user interface that you don't like.
|
| You can see how these things are going to go from the
| start. Startup invests in a nice user interface and they
| are declared the new darling without any viable business
| model. They can only operate this way for a while because
| it's unsustainable. Things change for the worse and the
| pattern is repeated. Sometimes the new kid considers how
| to make a sustainable business which can be an anathema
| in their startup community and things stay better for
| longer. I've not studied Substack, but I think they may
| have thought more about this.
|
| >> But WordPress? Isn't it controlled entirely by you?
|
| WordPress.com hosts WP for you. WordPress.org offers the
| open source version of the product.
| markhesketh wrote:
| They could be referencing wordpress.com, which is the
| hosted version of WordPress, rather than wordpress.org
| which is the open-source self-hosted version.
| Vibgyor5 wrote:
| I see your point and agree - Substack etc may exist today
| but might not in 2-3-5y down the line and it'd be valuable
| to have hold of your own writing from Day 1.
|
| On a different note, what has been the value of "creative
| posts" and even "creative name for your blog" for you?
|
| I am overthinking this but sometimes I find myself
| wondering whether my post is really all that useful, that
| my blog should have a more creative/captivating name to
| catch audience's eyes etc. Did you ever face that? If
| yes/no, how'd you suggest to overcome this?
| zerkten wrote:
| >> On a different note, what has been the value of
| "creative posts" and even "creative name for your blog"
| for you?
|
| Why do we name anything? There are many reasons, but it's
| important to distinguish your site from others. Content
| is the primary way to distinguish a blog because the
| original consumption tool was an RSS reader. Things have
| changed a lot, so more people go directly to most blogs.
|
| If you have web design chops then there is an opportunity
| to create a distinct experience. The value of this is
| felt most by people who can appreciate good design, so
| unless you've goofed up usability, most people probably
| won't notice the design much. Don't mess up the usability
| because people remember bouncing from those sites or
| complain in comments here.
|
| There are tons of developer blogs out there so unless you
| are notable in some area (big or small) for some set of
| readers then your name may not be enough. "Joel on
| Software" as a blog name stands out more than "Joel
| Spolsky's Blog". It is possibly easier to communicate
| verbally, signifies the content, feels informal, etc.
|
| Does it matter if the content is only useful to you? It
| doesn't. The act of blogging improves your writing,
| creativity, tech skills, forces you to learn etc. So, you
| move forward in area of your career that many software
| people struggle: communication. If you write about stuff
| close to the area you work in then you'll find you
| reference your own blog posts a lot. Scott Hanselman
| recommends writing a blog post and referencing it an
| email instead of sending the same content in that email.
| There is some good stuff linked from
| https://www.hanselman.com/blog/your-words-are-wasted.
|
| You overcome your problems by dealing with your anxiety.
| Why do you care about these specific aspects to the point
| that it blocks you from just writing and publishing? This
| is the differentiator between highly trafficked blogs and
| those that aren't. For a subset of people, noodling on
| these aspects and their blog template is the point
| itself. You need to decide on the true purpose, the why,
| and come up with a plan. There are lots of in-between
| steps like buying a nice template, drafting a lot of
| content to see if a name falls out of that, adopting a
| name like "Vibgyor5 on Software" etc.
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think the name or design matters very much at
| all.
|
| The vast majority of traffic you get to your blog these
| days will be because somewhere linked to an individual
| post.
|
| As long as it's readable, the people who arrive to read
| that post won't care about the branding that surrounds
| it.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| There has been enough instances of platforms dying, pivoting,
| or just plain ignoring their users. It is OK to use a
| platform, but own the content or a backup of it that you can
| "walk away if needed." So, owning your own domain and perhaps
| pointing it to the blogspots, substacks, and WordPresses of
| the world as a tool is a OK. One day, you will need to
| relocate to another platform or tool(s).
|
| If you own your own domain, and own the content, you can just
| walk out and it will still be alive. This is assuming that
| your content are more important (to you) than the platform.
|
| Once, WordPress was the new MovableType/Blogspot, Medium the
| new Wordpress, and now Substack the new Medium. You never
| know.
| benwerd wrote:
| I use Substack for the newsletter associated with my blog.
| It's pretty good! But it's as much a blogging platform as a
| newsletter engine, and you should consider what your exit
| strategy might look like if it ever shuts down. At a minimum,
| I'd configure a custom domain to use with it.
| racl101 wrote:
| I can't even get past the part where I gotta pick a domain
| name. lol
| burkaman wrote:
| I think the best strategy is to do both. Publish on your own
| site so you have control and aren't fully dependent on
| someone else's service, and then also post to Substack and
| wherever else your audience is.
|
| https://indieweb.org/POSSE
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't think Medium has a lot of cachet at this point but
| I used to publish on my own blog and cross-post anything I
| thought have broader interest to Medium. Lately, I'm mostly
| on content marketing sites which have promotion machinery.
| I think this year I will start posting more on my personal
| Blogger site and do professional stuff on a new hosted
| Wordpress site.
| marmot777 wrote:
| Email is one of the last remaining things where your audience
| is directly yours and not part of a walled garden. So
| newsletters have made a come back.
| neilv wrote:
| > _I'm interested in knowing if the creation and maintenance of a
| personal website have lead to paid full /part time jobs,
| increased learning, brought new connections to others or are
| purely vanity._
|
| My read of this was that it might've meant to frame the
| possibilities: "Exhaustively, is it for career development, or is
| it a moral failing?"
|
| Additionally, "vanity" seems a bit loaded, shifting the perceived
| tone to possibly annoyed suspicious/accusatory, like maybe the
| writer suspects the answer to the implied either/or might be the
| latter category.
|
| This read could be off, or maybe the writing hints at the
| writer's self-critical reflection on whether they should have a
| personal blog: when their only conscious goal would be career
| development, and they'd consider any other reason in themselves
| to be vanity, which they'd want to avoid?
| Thrymr wrote:
| Indeed, some of my favorite blogs have been basically made with
| the attitude, "this is my personal brain dump, I write it for
| myself, but make it public in case anyone else finds it
| useful." Sort of like social media, but often more thoughtful
| and better organized, and less often trying to be clever and
| get a reaction. Monetizing and quantifying everything has not
| necessarily made it better. Of course, blogs pioneered the
| toxic attention-hoarding space before social media did, too.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I've seen 3 major benefits:
|
| - It has helped me to clarify my thinking on many leadership,
| management, and product strategy topics
|
| - I now have a library of reference materials that I draw from
| fairly regularly (at least 1-2x per month)
|
| - I've found advisory/angel investing opportunities with strong
| companies from it
|
| I highly recommend blogging _if you enjoy writing_
|
| (https://staysaasy.com/)
| miroljub wrote:
| I write my blog for me. I put stuff there, so I can have easy
| online access to it, and so that I don't forget it, or have to
| google it again. It varies from pretty basic stuff, to some step-
| by-step tutorials.
|
| The benefit for me is that I have it when I need it. Oh, and a
| nice ego bust when I write a new blog post and see ~100 to 200
| daily visits for a few days before the external traffic dies out.
| phartenfeller wrote:
| My blog made it much easier to connect with people in my field. I
| work in a smallish niche, so most content creators have heard of
| each other.
|
| Additionally, the company related to my field (Oracle) invited me
| into their "knowledge sharing" program. This helps meeting other
| people and at most conferences, they invite us to dinner, which
| is nice.
|
| Besides, people telling me how a blog post helped them achieve
| something makes me happy and proud.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I'm using ActivityPub on my blog to network with others via a
| Friends plugin. I'm quite disenchanted with centralized social
| media at this point, short-form microblogging ala Twitter or
| Mastodon doesn't really interest me anymore versus substantial
| essays.
|
| My blog, https://hammyhavoc.com acts as a portfolio of what I've
| done. I started keeping a 'Now page'
| (https://hammyhavoc.com/now/) instead of posting on social media,
| it's much more detailed and interesting.
|
| People find my blog via Google et al via a lot of relevant search
| queries, and I've picked up a fair bit of work through it
| passively. I could probably blog a lot more, but I've realized
| that I've been inadvertently writing a non-fiction book about
| technology for the past decade, so a lot of posts just end up as
| fodder for that.
| nstart wrote:
| Don't know about my blog itself, but looking at my drafts,
|
| A) I can see how many ideas I had that fell apart the moment I
| started to write arguments about it
|
| B) how horrible I am predicting stuff and just how much I've
| saved myself from being on the record with really terrible calls
| on the then future that is now the present :,). This too because
| once I started to justify my prediction I lost all confidence in
| it. I still think fpv drone racing could have been bigger than f1
| though. Someday I'll publish that as the hill to die on :D.
| geocrasher wrote:
| I started a blog on Google Blogger as a way to give back to the
| PC breakfix community. When I got back into web hosting in 2013,
| I saw that WordPress had taken over. So I moved it to WordPress,
| and then one of my posts hit Slashdot [0] and made the front
| page. That was a first, and was _huge_ for me.
|
| Then in 2015, I had some serious Hackaday envy and so I started
| another WordPress blog[1] to document my hobby-engineering-
| related stuff. That took a turn toward amateur radio. I did some
| fun projects, got a bit of a following.
|
| In August 2021, I actually got to start writing for Hackaday.com,
| much in part due to the experience/voice that I'd created when
| writing for my blogs.
|
| I also used that experience/voice to do some writing-for-hire
| stuff at a well known site for low-end VPSs, and that experience
| got me in contact with people that landed me my current job,
| which is the most fantastic job I've ever had.
|
| [0] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/17/180242/surviving-
| th...
|
| [1] https://miscdotgeek.com
| petercooper wrote:
| I haven't proactively blogged in over 10 years, but when I did
| (mostly in the 2000-2009 range), almost everything ended up
| coming from it. I had a publishing company reach out to me to
| write a book about what I was blogging about (Ruby at the time),
| launched a professional blog off the back of it, had folks reach
| out for me to speak and/or chair their events, etc. I can connect
| a _lot_ of dots back to blogging. I really should take it up
| again.
| feiss wrote:
| Job.
|
| Art station is a very recent thing :)
| tristor wrote:
| I've had a personal website of one kind or another since 1996.
| The current iteration was started in 2015, and was intended to
| get me writing again, and was focused on my travels when I became
| a digital nomad for 18 months at that time.
|
| Since then, unfortunately, I have mostly let it stagnate. I use
| my site primarily as a mechanism to centerpoint other things I do
| online now, like photography, however I don't create as much as I
| used to.
|
| I am hopeful I will have time to write more in the future, but in
| some respects the topics I want to write about I have preferred
| to keep private, because if someone disagrees with you in the age
| of social media you face life-altering repercussions rather than
| an interesting dialogue. I still write at least monthly, but do
| so in a private journal by hand with pen and paper.
|
| I mostly write because I believe writing is thinking, and because
| I tend to have fleeting thoughts I want to capture and if I don't
| write them down they'll simply disappear. When I first got into
| writing online, doing so always created interesting
| conversations. Now, that is much rarer, so that is likely another
| reason I publish less of what I write.
| smcleod wrote:
| Saved me from repeating myself.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| For work, as a software developer, pretty much all of it has come
| through Linkedin, it's the laziest way a recruiter will look for
| staff. Keep that up to date with what you can and want to do and
| you should be alright in that industry.
|
| Personal websites can help, if they're looking for more of a
| thought leader than a pair of coding hands.
| snozolli wrote:
| Nothing tangible, like job offers. I have a couple of sites and
| each has a blog for my two main areas of interest: tech topics
| and mechanical stuff. Whenever I struggle to figure something out
| or compile information to make a decision, I write a blog post
| about it. This has proven useful several times when I needed to
| do something, vaguely remembered having done something similar
| before, and quickly find the details on my own site. Judging by a
| few comments, it's helped a few others over the years, too.
|
| I also keep wikis on those sites for more interconnected
| information.
| mkaszkowiak wrote:
| Not much, to be fair.
|
| It's fun to share it, but it didn't have any actionable impact on
| my career. Some employers tend to highlight it as a strong asset
| during the recruitment process. My posts didn't gain any major
| traction, outside of a single post that's bringing me Google
| traffic.
|
| With that being said, I don't regret running it at all! Posts
| will accumulate over the years, and I'm slowly getting better at
| writing :)
|
| If you're curious, I enjoy creating things and bike adventures:
| https://kaszkowiak.org/en/blog
| mjb wrote:
| I've been maintaining my blog (https://brooker.co.za/blog/) for
| just over a decade, and I continue to do it for a couple of
| reasons.
|
| - I often blog about research, which has started several very
| interesting conversations with academics and industry
| researchers, and even some very fruitful collaborations. Mostly I
| cover systems, database, and distributed systems work.
|
| - I believe that the ability to write well is skill with great
| career and personal benefits (see
| https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/11/08/writing.html). Writing my
| blog gives me practice in a kind of writing I don't do that much
| in my professional life. I think it's had a considerable positive
| impact on my writing skill overall.
|
| - It gives me a way to broadly share things I've been thinking
| about (e.g.
| https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/04/11/simulation.html), using at
| work (e.g. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/02/28/retries.html or
| https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/01/06/erasure.html) in a way that
| I find personally fulfilling and enjoyable. I got into a habit
| for a while of sharing this kind of thing on Twitter, but
| eventually found that leads to shallower conversations and
| shorter-lived artifacts and went back to mostly using my blog for
| that kind of content. I find that I genuinely enjoy teaching and
| sharing. I also like sharing my ideas without the overhead and
| formality of academic publishing (which, let's face it, is a
| painful process).
|
| - There are a whole lot of folks with blogs that I enjoy and
| admire, and want to emulate them to some extent.
|
| I think that goes beyond vanity, but also think I have limited
| ability to understand my own motivations, so it may just be
| vanity :)
| jslind wrote:
| I work lower in your same org tree with DDB and TxS and enjoy
| reading your blog. Gives insight into more tenured engineers
| and is good motivation for me as well. I am just kicking off my
| blog and hopefully I will have it go a decade as well.
| dist1ll wrote:
| It's awesome going through this thread and seeing all the
| light-grey links. Your blog is a gold mine for distributed
| systems.
| komali2 wrote:
| 1. Helped me get thoughts out of my head that are churning too
| much
|
| 2. Help me organize thoughts as I try to write them in a way
| that's helpful for other people
|
| 3. Allowed me to drop links into a chat with someone asking
| questions I've been asked before
|
| 4. Functioned as a memory bank when I forget how to do something
| I've done before
|
| 5. Functions as a scrapbook for when I want to reflect on a trip
| or something
|
| I don't have a cool story about being hired or whatever like
| other people. I think around 2000 people navigate to the blog a
| year, mostly to a post going into a great amount of detail about
| my emacs blog post. The follow up most visited is a post I made
| about buying a Grand Seiko which is quite bereft so I have no
| idea why it's so popular, I have way better posts lol.
|
| Kind of feeds my theory that a good way to get people reading /
| watching is to get a niche and stick in there. Possibly the Grand
| Seiko post gets so much volume because Grand Seiko's marketing is
| stupidly bad and seems to be completely dependant on content
| creators. So making content about them would fill somewhat of a
| vacuum.
| vjeux wrote:
| I wrote an article on writing JavaScript in C++ using macros,
| which was featured on Hacker News and got a VP of Engineering at
| Facebook to reach out and get me in the interview pipeline as I
| was still in school. I moved halfway across the world from France
| to work there and still work there today.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2478751
| Joeboy wrote:
| I'm not aware of anybody except me having visited my blog. I also
| don't enjoy writing it, and haven't learned anything particularly
| useful from doing so.
| philzook wrote:
| I have seen the benefits of: - Having some kind of concrete
| output to learning or little micro projects. Organizing and
| adding to my notes is kind of fun. - Documentation for my future
| self. Sometimes I do go back to refresh. - Some people have
| reached out for collaboration solely because of my blog - Not
| having to fixate on ideas anymore because I got them out there. -
| I don't know for sure, but I think it has helped my case getting
| hired, especially since my pedigree is a bit off for the job I'm
| doing.
|
| I think controlling your content is really important. I want it
| to still exist in 20 years. Getting off of wordpress was annoying
| and scary. I'm a fan of simple.
|
| https://www.philipzucker.com/
| zug_zug wrote:
| I've written a blog on/off over 10 years. It hasn't paid off in
| any form to my awareness. I rarely put ideas past draft anymore,
| but sometimes you have things worth saying even when you don't
| know anybody who cares to hear.
| the_jeremy wrote:
| I have a personal website that only hosts my resume (not a
| blogger). It has not resulted in anything positive (the only
| results were some spam emails).
| philip1209 wrote:
| As social networks have come and gone, it's been the hub of my
| online identity.
| penjelly wrote:
| i think it makes someone stand out ever so slightly, though an
| active GitHub does more so. But in my case I'm interested in
| writing more so it's supposed to incentivize that behavior from
| me, so a creative outlet
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I have a personal blog, a .com with my name since 2001. Soon
| after, got a .com with my family name and made it into a company.
| And here are a few events I remember off the top of my head -
| that shaped my life;
|
| - Got my first big speaking engagement in USA (I'm in India).
|
| - Got my small service company acquired-hired and got introduced
| to the world of Startups.
|
| - Bought a car, paid rent, and bootstrapped a few Startups.
|
| - Got a Girlfriend. A girl emailed that it is impossible for the
| live visiter on my counter to be speeding so fast (she suspected
| I might be cheating with a script that just increase the
| counter). I got a date to proof that my website was indeed that
| popular. Once upon a time, my website was pretty well visited. If
| I remember correctly, it did slipped in within 100 top Alexa
| Ranking (I'm fuzzy on this but it was hot).
|
| - Bought down a scammy/spammy company with a single blog post.
| But felt really bad within 5-6 months, and wiped out the whole
| content and apologized to the business owner. He did what he did
| but I should not have done that, which killed a business.
|
| - Helped a lot of businesses/startups launch by writing about
| them and felt really happy.
|
| - I know, at-least, one big tech company quoted my article as one
| of the sources for their patent.
|
| - Quite a few people have emailed me saying that my website
| shaped their career and I feel really happy about them. In-fact,
| there was a parent that emailed me as their son got the
| inspiration from my website to pursue a tech career. He was very
| happy when I called up and talked to him.
|
| - Of course, if not directly, my website played a vital role in a
| lot of interesting freelance/contract work that came - Disney,
| STARZ, Pearson, Cambridge, etc. Well, I got an almost-free entry
| to Disney World, Los Angeles for about two years around
| 2005-2007. ;-)
|
| - One rainy evening, I was with friends at HackerDojo in Mountain
| View. A guy behind came up and asked, "You are brajeshwar.com,
| right?"
|
| - Also, I have gotten a lot of legal takedowns, threats,
| copied/stolen without permission and what not!
| muhammadusman wrote:
| I have been blogging at https://blog.usmanity.com for almost 6
| years, but I have attempted to keep a blog for almost 10 years.
|
| My blog is a lot of personal updates, technical things I'm
| learning/wanting to teach, and updates on my projects.
|
| It helps me realize that even one post a month is enough to keep
| track of something.
|
| My blog isn't very popular mainly b/c I don't market it anywhere,
| it's mostly used to reference things I've done in the past and
| quickly find information.
|
| Last year, I started working on a project called BoardSearch
| (https://boardsearch.io) and right around that time my interest
| in mechanical keyboards was at a peak so it helped me share
| thoughts about building the website and also about keyboards I
| was interested in. This led to getting a bunch of organic search
| visits and now I'm doing 500-1000 views without any new content
| about keyboards most of the time.
| akdas wrote:
| I haven't written in a while, but the first year I started
| blogging, I set a goal to write at least one article each month
| for a year. I reflected on it after the 12 months. The
| highlights:
|
| - I got to the front page of HN a few times. Definitely a vanity
| thing, but it was fun!
|
| - My posts on dynamic programming, which got a lot of traction,
| resulted in someone I knew reaching out to ask me to speak at a
| conference they organize. The conference didn't result in much
| professionally, but I love public speaking. It was just a great
| experience.
|
| - I mentioned off-hand that I got to talk about DP, and that got
| me connected with someone who was able to create a video course
| on the topic. I learned a ton thanks to their guidance on things
| like how to organize smaller chunks of information that build up
| to a bigger course.
|
| - Another post about mental health got me a chance to be
| interviewed on a podcast. I'm a huge podcast listener, so I was
| ecstatic about actually being on one!
|
| With the confidence from the 12-month experiment, I then decided
| to write weekly about hiring in the tech industry, a topic I'm
| passionate about. I kept that up every week for over a year! What
| came out of that is I had a bunch of thoughts floating around in
| my head, and now I have them documented. Now if I want to bring
| up something about hiring, I probably already have an article I
| can just link instead of explaining it from scratch. The same
| actually applies to some topics on my personal blog.
|
| EDITED: Regarding that last point, I've been setting up a
| Raspberry Pi after a few years. Having some notes documented has
| been invaluable for myself.
| brightball wrote:
| It's one of those things that's hard to measure unfortunately,
| but I definitely think it helps.
|
| A lot of it is what you want to be doing though. I like to talk,
| teach, communicate, advise and coach. Blogging let's me get that
| across and I think it helps there. I don't know that it would
| make much difference for pure coding positions though. I have
| gotten a few offers to do paid blogging, but I really just don't
| have the time. One post I wrote for Codeship years ago that got
| picked up here was a compilation of about a years worth of
| research and experience to compare Elixir and Go.
|
| Definitely increases learning though. One of my teachers in high
| school told me, "If you really want to learn something, teach
| it." It's true. In order to publish something or give a talk on
| it, I go much deeper than I would have for my own uses.
|
| Ego certainly plays a part. I'm much more motivated to keep
| writing when I'm getting positive feedback on it. Got picked up
| by HN several times and learned a lot from the conversations,
| which was great. Brian Krebs retweeted me once, which motivated
| me to write a 6 part security series* that never got the same
| level of traction.
|
| Biggest issue for me is that I'm a long form, detailed writer. I
| know if I actually care about using this stuff for marketing then
| I'll need to slice the posts into bite sized chunks. Since I
| mostly write this stuff just to get it to stop bouncing around in
| my head, I stick with the long form way.
|
| * - https://www.brightball.com/articles/the-time-i-
| accidentally-...
| waprin wrote:
| I mostly blog because I like writing, I like owning my own
| identity on my own site, and because other people have written
| about the benefits it's brought them.
|
| I haven't blogged a ton (I plan to more) but I wouldn't say it's
| brought a ton of benefits so far.
|
| The blog posts that have done well have had people email me nice
| things, produced some mean and uncharitable comment sections,
| some offers for low-paying freelance writing opportunities, and
| some signups for some projects I'm working on.
|
| The number one piece of advice I'd give is to have some sort of
| goal in mind. If you're writing for fun, then make sure you have
| fun. If you're writing to build an audience, publish consistently
| and have a clear audience you're targeting in mind, and stick to
| writing stuff relevant to that audience. If you build an audience
| around a specific niche, you can convert that to something like
| signups for a product for people in that niche (e.g. a paid
| course on whatever programming topic you write about). However,
| you probably need to be somewhat intentional about that. And
| you'll probably get "stuck" in your niche to some extent, so pick
| one you care about. I think blogging increases your "luck surface
| area", but it's better to have a specific goal than hope for
| serendipity.
| lcall wrote:
| Mine (in profile) helps me say many things that I think are very
| important so I want to say to everyone, but others don't
| necessarily always want to hear. I can write it, organize it for
| skimmability, and post it, and just include my URL in my email
| sig or some such, which all helps me relax more about what I have
| to say.
|
| Plus having my own domains (at pair.com) gives me much more
| control over my email, without having to manage my own smtp
| server.
| larsbarnabee wrote:
| My website acts as a guide for my drawing progress (although I am
| still pretty bad, but will get better). I make a lot more YouTube
| videos. I do plan to publish articles, but I think videos do me a
| lot better. I think a blog is a requirement to have a map of my
| story. I try to post my YT videos on my website. Please take this
| advice, less is more. I like to use html pages and avoid managing
| a php website or anything more complex. I know it sounds weird,
| but I feel like the core of the web is a lot easier to maintain
| in the long term. Sorry to say, but I have not made a dollar with
| my blog. But I have heard a lot of thanks from people who want to
| draw. It keeps me going. My blog is https://larsbarnabee.com
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Cost me money.
| atum47 wrote:
| victorribeiro.com - people usually compliment me on it. My
| coworkers liked it a lot, but I can't remember if my current boss
| took it in consideration when I was applying for the job. I made
| it just for fun though, no intent to get anything out of it.
| lysecret wrote:
| Absolutely nothing besides teaching me how awesome tailwind
| typography is.
| rcarr wrote:
| tailwind typography is like having a web dev cheat code - its
| awesome. I've been building a personal site and its crazy how
| few classes I've had to add to style it.
| jarbus wrote:
| Just as a counter point, I've started a small blog, posting
| infrequently about all sorts of things, technical and not. This
| has not had any affect on my life whatsoever, it's been a fun
| timesink but I've not seen any returns.
| uallo wrote:
| I run a small blog that is based on a tiny custom script and a
| single markdown file. It builds static HTML files and deploys
| them using rsync, it takes less than one second to build and
| deploy. There is absolutely no technical maintenance required and
| I only publish things when I want to.
|
| The main use of my blog is that I note things down that are
| interesting to me. List of certain things, some learnings, the
| results of tool evaluations, etc. I use my own blog almost daily
| to look up things I can't remember clearly but know exactly where
| I can find them again. I sometimes also share some articles with
| colleagues. Other than that, I could not care less whether
| somebody actually reads it. From the Google Webmaster Console, I
| do know, however, that dozens of people end up on my blog every
| day.
|
| Would I start a blog again? Yes, absolutely.
| enriquto wrote:
| It got me laid.
|
| In 1996 I was a teenager and my dad taught me html and ftp. I
| wrote a website with some cheesy poems and drawings, and uploaded
| it to geocities/athens/acropolis. Also, I put links to my page on
| several web directories. A girl from another city read that
| website and sent an email to me. It would be untoward to tell the
| rest of the story.
| dn3500 wrote:
| I've had a personal web site since 1995. I've sold a few photos,
| given permission to use some others, and had some pirated. I've
| got a box full of postcards from around the world sent by fans. I
| have another box of magazines (Maxim probably being the most
| famous), newspapers, and a dozen or so autographed books in which
| my photos have appeared with credit.
|
| In the pre-facebook days it helped me locate some old friends I'd
| lost track of.
|
| The closest I've come to fame was when a local TV station
| interviewed me as "the expert" on an obscure subject because my
| web site was the first google search result.
| rr888 wrote:
| I started, I just didn't have the time and realized my blog was
| **. Looking around most other blogs are equally bad. There are
| some good writers out ther but the majority of tech people
| aren't.
| mydriasis wrote:
| It taught me javascript, and the Canvas API!
| hnarayanan wrote:
| It has been a place where I can document my thoughts and feelings
| over time. It is where I share what I learn.
|
| And I'm over 40 years old and never once been to an interview. I
| attribute at least some of it to having a website and a blog.
| willjp wrote:
| Learning and Retention. I find that I learn best if I learn a
| subject comprehensively. Taking notes in a mediawiki instance
| I've kept up for a decade forces me to explain what I've learned,
| helps with retention, identifying what I still need to learn, and
| is indexed so I can revisit information I don't use every day
| without as much pain.
|
| If someone else finds it useful, that's even better ;D.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Nothing.
| henrik_w wrote:
| I've been blogging about programming since 2011. I can't say that
| it has had any direct career impact, although it hasn't hurt
| either. I have kept writing because it helps me clarify my
| thoughts. I've also reviewed books and courses, and writing those
| reviews makes me learn the content much better.
|
| There are other reasons too that I have written about in this
| post:
|
| https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...
| Eyas wrote:
| Honestly I kind of just enjoy writing. My blog has gotten tons of
| views and still gets a fair amount of traffic, made on HN's front
| page a bunch, and have some post translated to a few languages.
|
| I haven't actively tried to monetize it (though I'd like to shift
| to income based on my own work rather than be tied to a company).
| I tried putting ads once in a while and it was ~decent but
| negligible, and kind of ruined the vibe. I have done a few one-
| off consulting things out of it and got some nice side-cash, but
| nothing meaningful.
|
| What I do get is feeling engaged with the wider tech community.
| Seeing common questions and comments. A feeling that what I'm
| saying might resonate with some people. Interesting discussions
| on Twitter and HN. A few podcast invites, etc.
| sshine wrote:
| Website: Point of contact.
|
| I don't use social media, so if people search for me, they can
| find my website.
|
| Blog: To ventilate and network.
|
| My blog posts have landed me job interviews and have expanded my
| professional network.
|
| But I mostly blog because I write a lot. I write to myself, and
| sometimes I think it's valuable to others, and then I have a
| place where I can share that and link to it. For example, when my
| colleagues make sketchy code, and I can't find a good place that
| explains why you want to think about it differently, I'll write a
| blog post.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I started all this because I like Slashdot and wanted to do a
| site just like that for librarians. Worked out pretty well for
| me. Thanks again* CmdrTaco!
|
| My website has given me my entire career. I started a blog in
| 1999, not knowing a damn thing about servers or programming.
| Running a blog, or any website, was a challenge back in the 90s.
| I kept at it, learned how to program, got a job as a programmer
| during the first dot com boom. Kept at it and learned how to do
| sysadmin stuff. Started my own little web hosting company. Along
| the way had several decent professional jobs and always kept the
| blog and hosting going. I'm now a sysadmin at a small non profit.
| I shut down my own hosting thing in 2020. The site has become a
| bit quiet, but I still keep it running, it's just a part of my
| life I guess.
|
| * I got to thank Rob here on HN one time a while back which was
| pretty cool.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I haven't typically had a personal website/blog dedicated to
| technology (I had a personal site for a while about a variety of
| things, but it was pseudonymous).
|
| But I do have a history of contributing to technical company
| blogs. So I can use that as a talking point here.
|
| As people have mentioned already - it proves you know what you're
| talking about. You send a recruiter a bunch of blog posts which
| are topically relevant to the job opening they have, _that gets
| you somewhere quicker_.
|
| As well I can confirm that writing things down is helpful for
| your own understanding. When you're thinking about how to improve
| the strength of the writing for people less experienced than you,
| you start to notice gaps in your understanding that you have to
| fill in before you hit "publish".
|
| I've never heard of any techies using their blog to get
| spontaneously wealthy like other types of bloggers/social media
| creators.
|
| But the biggest thing I think I've gotten out of blogging is
| making less work for myself. Sometimes, working at a software
| company there's common knowledge about how stuff works, and how
| to do certain things which doesn't become widely known
| externally. Sometimes it's something simple, like have a test
| case which illustrates and connects the dots between what's in
| the official documentation. You get blessing to publish that blog
| entry - and now that knowledge is _out there_ for people to find.
| If for some reason, somebody comes to you with that question
| again, you can just redirect to your blog entry, where you 've
| thoroughly explained it. I've had that save me time for sure -
| and I've heard that things I've written saved a lot of other
| people a lot of time.
| dmazin wrote:
| For me, the biggest benefit has been improving my thought
| process. I generally think better when I write. For example, this
| helps keep me on track. What hypothesis am I testing? What, in
| general, am I even doing? I find it just too easy to stray off
| course, or get confused, when flying free without a narrative to
| keep myself grounded.
| xyzelement wrote:
| In case this is helpful - I find a huge return on investment in
| maintaining a high quality LinkedIn profile. Not being an LI
| influencer, simply a profile that describes me and what I do very
| well.
|
| I've worked in 4 companies over the last 20 years - two of those
| begun as a recruiter finding me on LinkedIn.
|
| Part of making sure I am "findable" for the right opportunities
| is refining how I describe myself and the work that I do. That
| has naturally translated into a better resume and ability to talk
| about my work well in interviews and elsewhere.
| codingdave wrote:
| I have had small benefits from my blogs:
|
| 1) I ran a blog in the 00s about decommissioning old Lotus Notes
| environments and mapping out tech details of how to migrate from
| that platform to Microsoft tools. I got a few consulting gigs
| from that.
|
| 2) I put up some tools to design craft projects (knitting,
| beading, etc.) Got a little bit of monthly revenue, ended up
| selling the projects for a few thousand dollars.
|
| So nothing life-changing, but I definitely paid for maybe a half
| year of my life from those gigs.
|
| That being said, "purely vanity" is still more accurate. I didn't
| put any of that up with revenue as a goal. I wrote and coded for
| my own knowledge, and all benefits were purely accidental.
| rsoto wrote:
| I've been blogging for 20+ years on my personal website [1]
| (disclaimer: it's in spanish). I started it when I was a teenager
| as a way to teach myself discipline. I used to write every single
| day. Now it's a bit of a monthly occurrance but it has done quite
| a few things for me.
|
| 1. Landed me a job, and a few gigs 2. Started new friendships 3.
| Inadvertently taught me SEO 4. Did a bunch of side projects 5.
| Gave me my 15 minutes of fame
|
| I only wished I could write more often, but it's been a great
| journey. I want it to keep going.
|
| 1: https://www.therror.com/
| xena wrote:
| I've been running a blog at https://xeiaso.net for almost a
| decade now. It has been the single best decision I have ever made
| in my career. It allows me to skip technical screening
| interviews. It has made interviewing at companies _easy_ because
| I have _already proven_ that I understand what I'm talking about.
|
| Learning how to write well also makes it so much easier to
| explain things succinctly, especially when working remote like I
| prefer to.
|
| I've also been told that more junior people look up to me as a
| role model because of my blog, which is something that I am still
| getting used to, but I can accept.
| anotherhue wrote:
| I always enjoy your posts! Thank you
| becquerel wrote:
| I hope one day to have a site as cool as yours.
| joshcanhelp wrote:
| Your blog always blows me away with how different and fun it
| is. I only dream of being that authentic online. I love the
| call-outs from the specific personalities. So great!
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Great blog - I particularly enjoyed your salary transparency
| page - thank you for sharing that.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| [flagged]
| Hakashiro wrote:
| what
| trallnag wrote:
| [flagged]
| jjice wrote:
| Any tips for avoiding the urge to spend time setting up a fancy
| SSG and playing with that and never actually writing? I've done
| that a few times over the years...
|
| I imagine the advice would often be "just write", which I do
| agree is fair advice, but wondering if you had any takes.
| Linell wrote:
| I wrote about my experience with this here:
| https://thelinell.com/The-Notion-
| Experiment-8191f33eaa864469...
|
| The main idea for me was to just reduce the barrier to entry
| so that writing more was too easy to avoid. I already use
| Notion for taking notes throughout the day, so transitioning
| to also jotting down blog thoughts has been very easy and has
| increased the amount of writing that I do.
| sebstefan wrote:
| The blog is great, I love the layout with the tags, is it
| static? If it's open source I'd like to see how it's done
| xena wrote:
| AFAICT this is just Notion with a custom domain.
| dsr_ wrote:
| When I decrease the number of steps to go from thinking
| about a blog entry to publishing it, that increases my
| willingness to blog.
|
| Current steps:
|
| - make newpost NAME='even a temporary title is ok, but a
| permanent one is better'
|
| That creates a file with the headers and a couple of
| skeletal bits in the right place, then opens it in my
| editor.
|
| - make rsync
|
| That publishes it.
| alin23 wrote:
| Maybe rely on people that have done the tinkering already.
|
| For example after trying multiple SSGs, I eventually settled
| on the simplest combination for me: Caddy with markdown files
|
| Wrote about it here: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%2
| 0write%20this%20blog...
|
| I already had Caddy running for lunar.fyi and lowtechguys.com
| so it felt simple to just add some lines in the Caddy file
| and start writing words in .md files.
| xena wrote:
| Every time I get anxiety, I write one blogpost. I get a lot
| of anxiety.
|
| But really just work on writing or ideas for writing for half
| an hour every day. Even if you just write "I have nothing to
| write about today". Don't be afraid to just keep showing up.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Love this advice. Thank you for your blog.
| callahad wrote:
| I'm not sure Xe is the right person to ask about avoiding
| playing with the site's backend:
| https://xeiaso.net/blog/series/site-update ;-)
|
| (Maybe the trick is: if you must tinker, also turn that
| tinkering into writing?)
| xena wrote:
| Bingo! Most of the tinkering is aimed at helping me make
| the site better. In essence, my site is a bunch of smaller
| projects that add up into one bigger project. If you end up
| doing something cool with your blog, while you're working
| on the true usecase (for example, my stream VOD page:
| https://xeiaso.net/vods) you can write about what you
| learned along the way (https://xeiaso.net/blog/hls-
| experiment and https://xeiaso.net/blog/video-compression).
|
| Most of my site update posts are just my notes from
| tinkering with things turned into prose.
| ilyt wrote:
| Mine was fueled mostly with pure hatred of wordpress
| bmitc wrote:
| My recommendation would be to use either Jekyll or just go
| with Notion. I am allergic to setting up a bunch of stuff and
| just wanted to start writing. So I am using Jekyll's default
| Minima theme with some small adjustments, mainly to render
| MathJax and Mermaid diagrams in my posts. There was some
| initial hacking, but now I got it setup with a Docker
| devcontainer with VS Code, so it's as easy as pulling down
| the repository, and then starting to write.
|
| I have only written one article at the moment, but I am glad
| I got started with it. I hope to keep adding to it over time
| and have a few articles in the works.
| xena wrote:
| I second this. The only reason my blog is so complicated is
| that I get so much traffic that I have to overengineer it.
| Your blog doesn't need to be as complicated. Underthink
| things now so you can overthink them later. A friend of
| mine wasn't satisfied with Hakyll and ended up making her
| own thing on top of Deno and Fresh:
| https://twilightsparkle.fly.dev/, and she's super happy
| with that now.
|
| Please keep at it with writing! It's a super valuable skill
| that so few people actually use. It really sets you apart
| in the job market and is so underrated from a professional
| standpoint.
| sshine wrote:
| My way around just toying with site generators and actually
| write was:
|
| Start by writing to yourself. I started with writing down
| ideas in a private markdown system. (I'd recommend
| https://obsidian.md today.)
|
| I became less self-conscious about my target audience was
| myself. It also became easier to make assumptions about what
| they (I) know, which is still a game of "will I understand
| this in a year or two?" For me, writing about tech to a near-
| future version of myself was the beginning.
|
| Another tip: You may be in control of your documents (you
| maintain them, not some online system you don't own), but if
| you use someone else's blog platform, you won't have a chance
| to rabbit-hole the site making. There's something liberating
| about only caring about the content, not the layout.
|
| For some subjects, it helps to write under a pseudonym,
| because you can experiment with what's on your mind and not
| how people will treat you based on what you say. I've wanted
| to write about things like pornography and past jobs (those
| are unrelated, hehe), but I don't want to upset past
| colleagues or seem obsessed about pornography.
| tkyiitd wrote:
| The font is awesome. Can you please tell which font it is.
| xena wrote:
| It's just this: p, .conversation-chat,
| blockquote, em, strong { font-size: 1rem;
| font-style: normal; font-family: Menlo,
| monospace; }
|
| That's really the heart of it. I've wanted to try using a
| sans-serif font like Inter, but I'm stuck in a pit where
| people expect me to use a monospace font and any attempt to
| move away from that means I basically change a huge part of
| the site's visual identity. I'm still trying to figure out
| how to find some middle ground because I am told that the
| monospace font is hard for people with dyslexia to read.
|
| I'll figure out something, I'm sure.
| muggermuch wrote:
| It's changed my life.
|
| A few months ago, I wrote a post [0] talking about my experiences
| designing and building an ML-powered stock picking engine for my
| startup - the post went viral on HN, and it led to many
| fascinating conversations, valuable connections, opportunities to
| speak, and job offers (tech/ML, tradfi, and crypto). In fact, it
| quite directly led to my new job, as a team reached out with an
| opportunity that ticked off all the boxes I was looking for.
|
| Finally, thanks to my blog, I have made many new friends who I
| hope to engage with productively[1] going forward, and I feel
| more firmly embedded in the intellectual milieu of the Bay Area
| than I ever did. As a consequence, I am much more relaxed now and
| feel in control of the overall direction of my life.
|
| [0] https://principiamundi.com/posts/didact-anatomy/
|
| [1] The meaning of this may change over time
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Got me multiple jobs and even more interviews, prevented me from
| getting caught up in a few rounds of layoffs, introduced me to
| some lifelong friends, brought in consulting opportunities,
| afforded me the opportunity to meet and work with some of my
| heroes, etc. And I only post once or twice a year.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| My blog taught me how to write and communicate complex technical
| ideas to a broad audience. It's the single most valuable thing
| I've done in my career.
|
| There's lots of brilliant engineers in the world. I'm pretty
| good, but I'll never be the best programmer on the team. But I am
| exceptionally good at working with designers, artists,
| scientists, and hardware engineers.
|
| Communication is the hardest problem in tech. Writing is
| thinking. It's a skill that takes practice the same as any other.
| It's 100% worth the investment.
|
| https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I get a decent amount of emails from readers.
|
| Maybe it's because I have no comment function. But it's nice. Had
| some interesting conversations that way. Makes the Internet feel
| like it's inhabited by real people.
|
| I've also got a bit of press in part through my website activity.
| The New Yorker, Deutschlandfunk.
|
| But I mainly have a website because I like having a website. It's
| weird, experimental, unusual and disorganized just the way I like
| my coffee.
|
| https://www.marginalia.nu/
| adhoc_slime wrote:
| Hey! I love your search engine, it helps me remind myself of
| the originality that still exists ands is yet to be found out
| on the web.
| dkrajzew wrote:
| Nope, but HackerNews get interested in one tiny blog article on
| c64 palettes some years ago:
| http://www.krajzewicz.de/blog/stretching-the-c64-palette.php
| VLM wrote:
| I've blogged as a form of a research journal and it forces me to
| finish projects or at least document a great excuse for stopping,
| and it forces me to understand what I'm learning well enough to
| write a blog post where I won't get laughed at too much by non-
| noobs in the field.
|
| My interests are esoteric. I blogged up my process of learning a
| semi famous microcontroller RTOS, a FOSS virtualization
| infrastructure that peaked in the 10s that seems to be in the
| process of becoming rapidly forgotten, and a complete K8S /
| virtualization / HCI infrastructure system of many parts from a
| euro-ish company that seems mostly ignored in the USA (weird to
| me, its pretty awesome and the docs are all English!)
|
| I've also used blogs to write book reviews along the idea that I
| "will" finish the book and read the entire thing and learn it
| fully if I'm blogging up a detailed review of every chapter.
| nils-m-holm wrote:
| http://t3x.org
|
| This is purely an outlet of raw creativity, because I have
| nowhere else to go with it.
|
| Other than that I have never wondered what the purpose of my
| website is. It has brought me some moderate passive income of
| about $1000 per year over the lifetime of the site, all of it
| through book sales.
| mecklyuii wrote:
| I always played with things and always learned stuff.
|
| Non of them gave me a job directly though.
| codazoda wrote:
| I write for myself and it's great. I often use my own blogged
| instructions to guide me later. And, as a bonus, others find my
| instructions helpful and let me know. It's a great feeling.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| - I enjoy tinkering with static site generators and no-JS web
| design.
|
| - Paired with an RSS reader, it's a nice way to DIY a retro kind
| of social media, without scummy dark patterns and ad-laden
| middlemen.
|
| - It's a nice way to hone my writing skills.
|
| - It's a nice way to record my adventures outside of the tech
| space.
|
| I've only been writing for a couple of years, but I've already
| had some really enjoyable email exchanges with strangers who also
| write blogs (that I subscribe to via RSS). Especially since I
| left NYC, deleted Facebook and Instagram, and started to deeply
| invest in hobbies, this replacement for social media has been
| invaluable. It really gives me a sense of online community that
| American cities sadly lack.
| rado wrote:
| Organisation of photos and thoughts in one place which isn't
| controlled by a corporation or algorithm.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| OK I will be the party-pooper this time.
|
| Blogging is a waste of time. You see a website with 100 blog
| posts. That could easily be 1000 hours of work. And then if you
| ask such person if he/she gained something from it the answer
| will be of course. The relevant question should be - was it worth
| the effort? Could they have gotten the same thing with less
| effort in some other way?
|
| When/if you are starting to blog you should make your goal clear.
| Are you blogging to get some money and side income? - there are
| better ways to achieve this. Are you blogging to advertise
| something? - there are better ways. Are you blogging for vanity
| and fame? - there are better ways. Are you blogging to create
| notes for your future self so you do not forget something? -
| there are better ways.
|
| In my opinion there are very few goals where "having a blog" is
| the right answer.
| throwwwaway69 wrote:
| What if I'm blogging to demonstrate knowledge and thought
| around professional topics with the intent to help demonstrate
| to future employers I know what I'm talking about?
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| I would bet that the potential future employer would be more
| impressed by your ability to make and solve things, rather
| than talk about them. So unless you will be applying for a
| teaching or writing position it would be safer to use your
| knowledge for starting projects and creating a portfolio.
| throwwwaway69 wrote:
| I'm in product management (though a former engineer).
| You're right that knowing the tools and how to apply them
| is definitely meaningful. But I also have to demonstrate
| that I know more than just the use of tools. And unless I
| want to build out 20 different projects, I feel like
| writing about the application rather than just doing the
| implementation is the best path forward with my limited
| time
| ilyt wrote:
| Back when I blogged it was mostly "I did a thing, I want to put
| notes about the thing somewhere, might as well make a blog post
| out of it". And it came handy a bunch of times.
|
| Why not personal notes but a blog ? Coz I can link it to co-
| worker
| KronisLV wrote:
| > In my opinion there are very few goals where "having a blog"
| is the right answer.
|
| My blog has sections for articles and tutorials, even a section
| for documenting how broken a lot of the software out there is
| and I'd say that overall it's been a pleasant experience
| throughout the years. On one hand, it helps me jot down how to
| do certain things in a structured way, other times to practice
| expressing my views and experiences in a reasonably structured
| way and to just get better at writing.
|
| I recall someone saying the following in a conference, which
| stuck with me (paraphrasing): "If you write something down and
| nobody ever reads it, those keypresses are sort of wasted."
|
| So, I occasionally write. A lot of it is sub par but has
| resulted in a few job offers (which I admittedly didn't take at
| the time), or just nice e-mail conversations with other people.
| Here's a brief look at the blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/
|
| As for personal sites, while I don't see myself having one of
| those super artistic portfolio sites that some lovely people
| out there do, I at least have a way of writing down some of the
| things that I've worked on over the years, my views, others'
| feedback and so on: https://kronis.dev/
|
| Is it a super optimized and effective way at getting income,
| job interviews, clout or whatever people care about? Not
| really. Could someone call it a waste? Sure, but then again, a
| lot of the stuff we do as human beings is a bit of a waste when
| you think about it: watching shows or entertainment videos
| online, playing videos games, looking at memes, working on side
| projects that nobody will ever see and so on.
|
| Sometimes it's nice to spend time on something that feels
| almost therapeutic in a way. Not everything needs to be perfect
| or optimized all the time, or even have a "right answer". The
| comfiness of it all actually reminds me of this article "An app
| can be a home-cooked meal":
| https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
| [deleted]
| khromov wrote:
| Years ago I started a personal blog but like many others, I found
| myself struggling to write more than a couple of posts per year.
| The barrier of quality felt too large. So I decided to create a
| separate shortform blog where I would share small code snippets
| that solved problems for me.
|
| It turned out to be quite popular and since I started the blog in
| 2013 it's gotten well over 1.5 million visitors and still
| attracts hundreds every day, exculsively from search traffic.
|
| While I can't say that it changed my life in any way, it did
| bring me a lot of satisfaction that it helped many people. It
| also taught me about the concept of "long tail keywords" on
| Google!
|
| You can find it here if you are interested:
| https://snippets.khromov.se/
| wannabebarista wrote:
| As many have said, I often write about things which I couldn't
| find elsewhere online (or else didn't like what was available).
| For instance, I wrote some rough guides to learning measure
| theory and computational complexity as well as annual surveys of
| interesting books and papers I've read. I only post a few times a
| year, but you would be surprised how often someone shares your
| problem or is looking for the same info you are.
|
| The biggest benefits are 1. seeing feedback from readers (either
| good or bad); 2. writing stuff down often helps one solidify
| their fuzzy thoughts and gives a clear goal to work toward.
|
| My website: https://bcmullins.github.io
| now__what wrote:
| In my interview for my current position, the team mentioned some
| elements of my website in a positive light, so I think it helped
| me stand out a bit.
|
| Otherwise it's just good for bookmarking links and ideas that I'd
| otherwise forget about. And it's handy to link to friends if they
| ask me about my hobbies, e.g. "here's what I remember about X off
| the top of my head, but if you want more details and links to
| reference material, there's a section dedicated to it on my
| website."
| rozenmd wrote:
| In short, brings me employment opportunities, and customers for
| my business.
|
| I wouldn't have been referred to my current job without it.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| I wrote some technical articles on Dwyer.co.za. Mainly for fun.
| Partly because I wanted to 'give back'. Partly because I found
| the articles a good way for me to learn stuff and often found
| myself referring back to them later.
|
| I got inbound leads from people asking me to write similar
| articles for them and a book deal. I started charging small
| amounts at first and then larger ones later on.
|
| Now its my full time business (ritza.co) that pays me a better
| salary than I was earning as a full time employee and supports
| several team members.
|
| I would say having a blog can easily be life changing, but is
| worthwhile even without that just for the personal growth aspect.
| batterylow wrote:
| I've just relaunched https://shahinrostami.com after spending a
| little too long writing the static site generator that now
| generates it. That, and https://datacrayon.com, have been the
| catalyst for several opportunities that have come my way.
| salamo wrote:
| I have a few ML-related demos on my blog that I created in school
| to help me to understand some fundamental concepts. I have
| pointed to them during interviews and I think they helped to
| demonstrate a depth of knowledge that words alone could not.
| pncnmnp wrote:
| Hey, I enjoyed reading your article on Alphabet Chess
| (https://lukesalamone.github.io/posts/alphabet-chess/). The
| idea seems quite unique, but I can understand how it could lead
| to positions where the engine may consider the position to be
| almost equal, but it could be objectively worse for one of the
| players. It would be interesting to compare this variant with
| Fischer Random Chess.
|
| According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_r
| andom_chess#White's_a...,
|
| > It has been argued that two games should be played from each
| starting position, with players alternating colors, since the
| advantage offered to White in some initial positions may be
| greater than in classical chess. However, ..... on average a
| Fischer Random starting position is 22.2% less unbalanced than
| the standard starting position.
|
| Here's a Reddit post from October 2022 (https://old.reddit.com/
| r/chess/comments/yeregq/fischer_rando...) that states the
| following:
|
| > Mean centipawn advantage for white - 36.82 Standard deviation
| - 13.79 Most "unfair" positions with +0.79 advantage
|
| If I am interpreting your diagram correctly, it appears that
| Fischer Random Chess provides more balanced positions.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| I actually started working on a free open source tool for
| developers recently because I wanted to create a new blog for a
| startup and Wordpress was surprisingly the best option.
|
| Wordpress is super outdated and bloated, and I feel like there
| has to be a better way.
|
| I'd love some feedback if anyone has some to give! The link to
| the project is in my bio. Please :)
| SMAAART wrote:
| I have a personal web site where I blog about once/twice a week.
| I blog about my personal observations on personal life and also
| professional life. The domain name is a variance on my first
| name.
|
| I also have a "portfolio" site, and I am in a career path where
| none of my peers have a portfolio site. There I show off my
| technical expertise in a handful of software packages that are
| crucial to my career. The domain name is a technical name about
| these software packages.
|
| Last year I concluded a successful job search and landed a very
| good job at a very good company. I used my personal website
| domain name as my contact, and highlighted my portfolio site in
| my resume to back-up my experience and expertise.
|
| It was often a topic during my interviews.
|
| These days I am studying Data Analytics / Data Science (and now
| ChatGPT/ML too) in order to augment my skillset and possibly make
| a career pivot. I have taken a very short very good domain name
| about data and I have started to blog about my perspective of
| Data Analytics/Data Science from my present career track (they
| kind of intersect / overlap a bit), documenting my learning
| progresses, collecting resources etc... this actually has landed
| me 1 interview at a great company without applying (the recruiter
| saw my LinedIn profile and this site); but the job was way above
| my head, but it was a good experience.
|
| I advice everyone who asks me for job hunting advice the same:
| don't job hunt, build a career, and also build an online presence
| and a portfolio. I am no good at helping people getting a job in
| 30 days or less, but I am very good at coaching people in getting
| a great job 5-10 years down the line, if they start now.
|
| Moreover, writing every day (I do that on my own Google Docs),
| helps think better; better thinking leads to better problem
| solving; which leads to better writing.
|
| And then ChatGPT came along, and it's changing everything by
| augmenting people's capabilities.
|
| Stay tuned.
| input_sh wrote:
| Both good and bad:
|
| - Won a stupid writer's award at ~20yo (Opensource.com's Reader's
| Choice Award). Still proud of it.
|
| - Gotten me my first internship.
|
| - Gotten me a couple of TV interviews in my early 20s (not a lot
| of tech people in my country had a prominent public presence).
|
| - Gotten me a couple of all-expenses-paid trips to like a dozen
| of conferences (some regional, some Europe-wide).
|
| - Had a lot to do with me getting a Mozilla fellowship.
|
| - Easily reached four to five digits within a day on a couple of
| occasions. Always followed by criticism, sometimes fair,
| sometimes unjustified.
|
| - Was once threatened to be sued by a CEO of a web agency or a
| hosting provider (can't remember) from a neighbouring country
| because I kind of elevated his homophobia. It was amusing.
|
| Best decision I could've made for myself in my early career, it
| really helped me stand out _very quickly_ (in my tiny country,
| not guaranteed).
|
| Since then, nothing, but that's kind of intentional. I barely
| publish anything. My Obsidian is full of finished posts that are
| never gonna see the light of day because I'd rather do anything
| else than deal with internet drama.
| Bootvis wrote:
| Nothing really.
|
| It led to some learning I would probably have done in any case.
| rexf wrote:
| Yeah, I enjoy writing blog posts, but not on a routine
| schedule. My blog has some light traffic, but it has not been
| game changing as some other commenters have experienced. It can
| be an issue of topic/depth since I blog about a variety of
| topics and not deep dives.
| Daegalus wrote:
| For me it has done a couple of things. I do have to say though. I
| write like a couple blog posts a year or longer inbetween. Ive
| only recently starting doing more frequent posts.
|
| 1. It lets me experiment with web tech. I redo my website every
| few years. Be it JS, CSS, static generated sites, etc. I usually
| find a theme I like and start modifying it to see how things work
| nowadays. Most recent attempt is to use that with a Golang and
| go:embed to make a self-contained blog in a binary.
|
| 2. Sometimes I just want to share knowledge or info. Might not be
| perfect, but its fun to get it out of my head instead of letting
| it stew. If it helps 1 person figure something out, it is a win.
| I recently had a coworker find my blog post on setting up Stable
| Diffusion on AMD through Hacker News by accident. He used it as a
| reference to get his own stuff working for a less than perfect
| setup.
|
| 3. I once posted one of my posts on here. It surprisingly went
| well, and had some good discussion on it. So that is fun. But I
| am of the mindset that I don't want to post my own articles (as
| their own HN posts, I am fine with linking to things in comments
| on occasion). They should show up on HN naturally if they are
| useful to someone enough to get posted. I also fear them getting
| ripped to shreds (probably some form of imposter syndrome) by HN
| readers.
| 72mena wrote:
| TL;DR: One blog post I wrote had a big impact on me getting a job
| opportunity in the US.
|
| ---
|
| I grew up and lived in Mexico most of my life.
|
| Back in 2014 I was a consultant working in Accenture Mexico. One
| weekend I wrote a UX analysis of the "Settings" screen in mobile
| platforms, and I posted it on my personal site. (Long lost, but
| reposted [here](https://72mena.com/the-ux-of-mobile-settings/)).
|
| I don't know how it happened, but after a few weeks of no
| traction, it suddenly got a ton of traffic and my site went down.
|
| One year later I was interviewing for a contractor role that
| required relocation to the US. My last interviewer (and decision
| maker) mentioned to me something along these lines: "hey, I saw
| your name and it reminded me about your "UX of Mobile Settings"
| article, I remember reading it and I liked a lot the analysis you
| did."
|
| I suspect this article (with all its flaws and broken English)
| had a big impact on me getting the UX position I was applying
| for, which made me relocate to the US.
| nkantar wrote:
| In addition to immense personal satisfaction, I've found the
| following benefits to maintaining a website, specifically with a
| blog:
|
| - I conducted two job hunts publicly, and each time I published a
| "hire me" post that I could use as a sort of generic cover
| letter. It helped me flesh out what I was looking for, and what a
| potential employer should be looking for in order for my
| employment there to make sense. It also resulted in some
| extremely high quality interviews in instances where the hiring
| manager took the time to read through them, and in one case
| eventual long-term employment, which is still ongoing.
|
| - After I gave a talk at several meetups and a conference, I
| published a post that both linked to the recording and was also a
| written version. Every so often an appropriate opportunity to
| share finds me, and I'm glad to have it ready. I've gotten very
| positive, grateful feedback on this from several relative
| newcomers to programming specifically, and one of them eventually
| directly reached out with a job opportunity.
|
| - I've referenced several of my posts long after publishing them,
| as they were notes on something I had figured out but would
| forget each time. Private notes could also work here, but
| publishing them publicly encouraged me to be thorough.
|
| - The platform I use for the site has changed a number of times
| over the years, but most of the iterations have been some sort of
| Python based static site generator or dynamic web app. Back when
| I started maintaining it in 2014, I was quite new to Python, and
| building and rebuilding the site definitely taught me things that
| have come in handy at work.
|
| I'm sure there are other direct effects I'm forgetting, and a
| plethora of indirect ones. I consider it an extremely worthwhile
| effort.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Either your blog picks up and it becomes your identity - and can
| be useful for getting hired - or it's useless.
|
| It's a bit like github: if it's not great you won't get much out
| of it, if it's good you'll get some gigs out of that.
|
| Personally I discontinued my old blog back in 2011 and it wasn't
| never very useful, while my github still gives me leads for jobs
| and reputation.
|
| I have a friend who is really good at maintaining his blog but it
| doesn't seem like it served him any good.
| timbray wrote:
| Got me jobs, helped me hire other people, got me a ticket to some
| of the big technology debates and then helped me win one or two.
| Gave me a place to write cat obituaries and heavy-metal reviews.
| Launched Feb 27, 2003 (20 years last month) and I haven't
| regretted it for a microsecond.
|
| [https://tbray.org/ongoing/]
| jgrahamc wrote:
| This blog post on my personal blog did have a wider effect:
| https://blog.jgc.org/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-apology-fr...
| ssklash wrote:
| Thanks for writing this. What happened to Turing was heinous,
| and I'm glad history has ultimately recognized him and his
| genious.
| calcsam wrote:
| Had no idea about this. Fascinating.
|
| Three months later:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-...
| jgrahamc wrote:
| You might enjoy: https://blog.jgc.org/2009/09/hello-john-its-
| gordon-brown.htm...
| neilv wrote:
| Awesome! Speaking up and being part of some positive impact
| is commendable and satisfying. Getting a nice call from a
| leader to acknowledge that is a tickling story on top.
| ghilston wrote:
| My website has given me a place to share projects I've done or
| small snippets I've learned about. I am always writing as if I am
| the audience, as I'm referring to it quite often.
|
| Over time I've noticed that readership has increased and I've
| started to get comments from readers either asking for additional
| help or offering advice. With that also comes a ton of companies
| offering their paid services to improve my seo ranking....
|
| Overall, it's a nice stress-free place to write.
|
| https://www.greghilston.com/
| qmarchi wrote:
| Recent anecdote; I was recently laid off and was on the hunt for
| a new position. After applying for hundreds of positions, I got a
| few interviews at one of the companies I was excited to work
| with.
|
| Every single interview, from the ICs that were interviewing me,
| to the Director of the Org that I chatted with, had read one of
| the articles on my blog.
|
| Ended up having some great conversations at the end of the
| interviews, and I think that's really what helped me get the
| offer.
| chasd00 wrote:
| my little laser cutting / 3dprinting service buys me lunch a
| couple times a month :) oakclifflaser.com
| itpragmatik wrote:
| My personal website is for my family only - a simple
| chronological photo albums grouped by year - have been
| maintaining and using it for last 20+ years and had given immense
| amount of joy and conversation starters for my family. It's a
| static website built using JAlbum. Nothing interactive more than
| navigating between photos and albums. Very very satisfied and
| happy that I did it and plan to continue ahead as long as I keep
| taking photos of family and family gatherings.
| MartijnHols wrote:
| My website did not have a blog until last week and it's still
| mostly hidden. I landed two well paying freelance jobs directly
| with customers (i.e. no recruiters) from it. They had a project,
| needed help, Googled and found me. Sharing this to say that while
| I reckon a blog will help, it's not essential. I only started
| working on a blog _after_ my websites proved itself.
|
| If you're curious, it's an about me with project history:
| https://martijnhols.nl/
| hisham8k wrote:
| [dead]
| Artgor wrote:
| I created a personal website a couple of years ago:
| https://andlukyane.com/ 1. It is a convenient place to keep and
| manage information about career - jobs, talks, other activities.
| Makes it easier to share info with recruiters. 2. Most of my
| blogposts are paper reviews (on ML), some are about my
| experience. 3. I got several interviews thanks to this blog.
| During some interviews people shared very positive feedback on
| it. The most notable example was the last interview in my current
| company: it was a bar raiser, the interviewer told me that he
| looked at my website and really liked it. It made the interview
| very positive and resulted in me getting this job. 4. I got a
| couple of small consulting gigs thanks to my website.
| datadeft wrote:
| > What has your personal website/blog done for you?
|
| Nothing, but it helped many people to get started with something
| or fix problems for themselves.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I've had a lot of real consulting work (not just students wanting
| me to do their final year projects...) from my blog and YouTube
| channel.
|
| https://atomic14.com and https://www.youtube.com/@atomic14
|
| The other benefit has just been the fact that my side projects
| are actually getting finished and documented.
| bcherry wrote:
| I'm fairly certain that writing about JavaScript on my personal
| blog (https://adequatelygood.com) led directly to landing a
| lucrative job at Twitter in 2010 which was foundational to my
| career. I had just a few months of experience in JavaScript (or
| programming in any serious professional capacity) but writing
| about it made me taken seriously and was a major accelerant to my
| career.
|
| Not sure of whether that experience is transferable in the
| current landscape. It also didn't hurt that I was already living
| in SF.
| paultannenbaum wrote:
| Early in my career I referenced your article on the js module
| pattern constantly, and referred it to several team members. I
| still use it to this day on some occasions. Cheers!
| itissid wrote:
| I think the idea of sharing writing in general could be broken
| down into a few fundamental benefits where the reception of said
| benefits depends on the person and the situation.
|
| 1. Sharing ideas to get feedback from a community can be
| incredibly useful for iteration.
|
| 2. Rubber duck principle: Sharing your thoughts out loud helps
| you refine them and you arrive at a better understanding of the
| subject. Example Stack overflow questions and answers.
|
| 3. Catharsis and/or Story telling: People who want to just write
| to express what they feel or like or do can be just incredible.
|
| 4. Money. Yeah.
| surprisetalk wrote:
| I think this essay best summarizes the benefits of starting a
| blog:
|
| [1] https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/
|
| Personally, I've found 2 major benefits for publishing my essays:
|
| 1. Any time I encounter a problem, I write it down as an "essay
| idea". Most of the time, I solve my problem without anything
| interesting to write about, but sometimes I have an "aha!" moment
| to analyze. People trick themselves into thinking they understand
| something, until they start writing. Deep writing makes it
| extremely clear when you have no idea what you're talking about.
| And so the writing process helps me solve problems, and hopefully
| helps other benefits from my findings.
|
| 2. Conversations become more interesting IRL. When I go to
| parties, people who read my blog love hunting me down for follow-
| questions and ideas. And I sometimes get summoned into circles
| with "Oh, Taylor recently wrote an essay on this! Where is he?
| Call him over here!"
|
| [2] https://taylor.town
| rob74 wrote:
| Regarding your first point - I once found the solution to a
| problem I had (I forgot what it was exactly) by starting to
| write a StackOverflow question. Similar to a blog post, this
| forces you to explain the problem to yourself first before
| explaining it to others, and that leads to better
| understanding.
| wcarss wrote:
| > People trick themselves into thinking they understand
| something, until they start writing. Deep writing makes it
| extremely clear when you have no idea what you're talking
| about.
|
| This often actually stops me from writing. A short ways in, I
| realize I have no clue what's really going on. I start reading
| to learn more, then I either get discouraged by the complexity
| of it, have a crisis of confidence, or plain run out of time,
| and fail to ever come back to complete a post about that
| specific topic.
| hisham8k wrote:
| [dead]
| adityaathalye wrote:
| Douglas McIlroy code reviewed something I wrote [1] (pardon the
| too-long URL)! A recent Show HN I did about my site maker [2] was
| quite wonderful.
|
| But mainly, I've derived lots of personal satisfaction from the
| writing process [3] and the making of the site [4] and site maker
| (everything is hand-rolled).
|
| ref:
|
| [1] https://www.evalapply.org/posts/shell-aint-a-bad-place-to-
| fp...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34486596
|
| [3] https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/
|
| [4] https://www.evalapply.org/posts/shite-the-static-sites-
| from-...
| INTPenis wrote:
| It has been a repository of knowledge that I've returned to
| multiple times. Not much else.
| joshcanhelp wrote:
| I've been writing online since 2008. The tangible benefits have
| been:
|
| - I wrote a simple HTML template for a friend that mimicked the
| style of a popular website. I wrote about it and put it up for
| download. Someone asked if there was a WordPress theme for it so
| I made one. I ended up making low/mid 6 figures overall,
| including sales for several years and selling the business.
|
| - When I was doing freelance development, I got a few clients
| from my contact form. Not nearly as much as I hoped and usually
| smaller projects, but it was something. Every new client leads to
| introductions to other clients, which was the main pipeline for
| business for me.
|
| - Everything technical I've written about has helped me level up
| in that topic to make sure I'm not leading someone astray or
| sound like an idiot!
|
| - When my site was WordPress, I got a number of very kind,
| personal comments on some of my less technical posts. Not tons,
| like 3-4 that I can remember fondly. It's such a wonderful
| feeling to have this momentary, text-based connection with
| someone you know nothing about. Brought back BBS days a bit.
|
| - I got one really nasty comment that I still remember. Really
| brought me down a while but I used it to move past some of my own
| feelings about my work. Turned out to be a silver lining!
|
| Intangible:
|
| - Writing regularly has been both a great outlet for me, as well
| as an important secondary skill at work. I'm always known as "the
| writer" on the team, and I think that's helped me advance in a
| lot of ways.
|
| - With 1K+ page views a month on a variety of topics, I can't
| help but to think that I'm helping some people with some things.
| That makes me feel good enough to keep doing it.
|
| - My work writing is intensionally concise and dry (in most
| cases), my journaling is free-form, and my fiction is nascent.
| But blogging publicly feels like the place where it all comes
| together. I try to make it fun and casual while also accurate and
| concise. It feels like the most challenging writing that I do.
| mad44 wrote:
| At https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/ I distill and summarize
| distributed systems and database systems research paper. I
| recently got over 600 posts.
|
| The main benefit of the blog for me was to crystallize my
| understanding. Having forced myself to post in public, I try to
| write a simple and accessible summary. This leads me to realize
| the gaps in my understanding, and fill them. This also
| strengthens my understanding, because by explaining the work in
| my own words, I internalize the concepts better. When I revisit a
| paper I have read before, the difference between a paper I wrote
| a post about and one I just read for myself is clear as day and
| night. I have a much better recall about the paper I posted. For
| a paper I wrote a summary, I just go to my summary and am able to
| cache back in all my understanding of the paper to my brain with
| a quick re-read of my summary.
|
| This being said, I also benefited in terms of networking and
| collaboration. Through the blog post discussions on Twitter, I
| made many friends who work on distributed systems and databases.
| I think the blog was also useful for getting me a sabbatical at
| Microsoft Azure CosmosDB in 2018.
|
| Finally, it feels really good to share my learnings, and put my
| rough ideas in the open. I learn from other blogs, and it feels
| good to give back. Every couple months I would get an email,
| thanking me for my blog, and that means the world to me.
| ferCats99 wrote:
| Honestly? Next to nothing, but it's nice to know that I have a
| space for me, managed by me where I can write in my preferred
| format and follow my own limits, it's really nice
| mattbgates wrote:
| This month, confessionsoftheprofessions.com, turned 10 years old.
| It has helped me understand SEO and building other websites. It
| has made the equivalent of a few hundred bucks a year or averages
| out to paying for itself. It also helped spark the idea for a
| book I wrote you can find at mylifeasawomanproject.com (project
| interviewing hundreds of women around the world during covid-19).
| It's put me in touch from people all over the world. And of
| course, it has made me a better writer.
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