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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!)
[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!”
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!
- 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.
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.
- 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 :)
- 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!
I restarted late 2021, after over a decade off-web. Back then (in hindsight) it was me trying to look clever. I used to dislike my writing.
These days I'm fairly happy with my posts.
I try to be correct, but not clever. In fact I'm happy to be corrected --- that's the whole point! I try to write in my own voice, but I don't aim for literary finesse. I don't write for any particular audience, but I do share links in communities of kindred gentlenerds out of common interest.
Several wonderful conversations have happened so far.
The most unexpected was a brief conversation with the grandmaster Douglas McIlroy himself. I'd cold-emailed him a thank you and linked to my post featuring his famous shell pipeline. I received generous critique and advice. That week, I was walking on clouds :)
I've also had a couple of unexpected (and nice!) "front page of HN" experiences.
Recently, one of my blog posts on my Org Mode workflow hit the front page. If my analytics is to be believed, it has taken on a second life bouncing off various parts of the Internet. That front-paging was warm on the heels of another recent Show HN I did of my site maker (written in Bash), which generated some lively discussion :)
Overall, I'm quite pleased with how it's going!
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?
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.
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.
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...)
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.
- 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.
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...
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.
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/
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.
A few years ago, a friend gifted me a domain name, and simultaneously, I signed up to AWS so I could goof around with all the free-tier cloud features, and basically just learn some cloud architecting.
I quickly settled on the Bitnami image of a MediaWiki stack on top of Ubuntu. It was fairly easy to get set up, but of course I quickly realized why the average Joe does not want to do this sort of thing. I had to be my own sysadmin, which I knew fairly well, but I also had to be my own CISO, and the logistics of running a bare OS on a VM on the public Internet are definitely daunting in the 2020s.
I attracted futile probes of my ssh port and I also attracted some sort of spammers to create throwaway MediaWiki accounts. In fact, the aforementioned friend showed me a few security holes in my MW configuration, and I was thankful he did it and not some malicious stranger.
Eventually, MW failed in some perplexing way, and I was frankly appalled at the myriad ways that AWS costs could literally get out of control and I'd have a 5-figure monthly bill with little recourse. I pulled out completely and shut it all down, after a few months had elapsed.
All in all, it was a good experiment, and really not disastrous; I did accomplish the learning of various cloud administration techniques, so I appreciated that. I don't miss the crazy opaque billing. There was so much more to learn. Perhaps someday.
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.
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.
I really dislike how LinkedIn tries to get you to put your full CV online. Yeah, you don’t have to but it looks bad to have an empty LinkedIn profile.
The trigger for me to close my LinkedIn account was that my then boss asked why I had deleted my CV from LinkedIn. In a bullying tone that implied I had something to hide. Which wasn’t true, I simply never had posted the history of my job positions on LinkedIn because … I think that’s rather private info that I only share when I apply to new jobs. So there really is social pressure to share more than you want on LinkedIn.
That’s different with my personal website. There, I have full control over what impression I want to give to visitors and what information I want to share.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This blog though does not generate any revenue, I see it as a personal achievement which will perhaps be my contribution to the world at large which might be remembered or make an impact. The vision of the blog started from the idea to preserve knowledge which might be otherwise lost/forgotten. This blog was/is the guiding light for me in my dark times.
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...
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.)
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.
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.
Not sure of whether that experience is transferable in the current landscape. It also didn't hurt that I was already living in SF.
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://fredlybrand.com/2018/10/15/goldratts-the-goal-chapte...
The counts are low for the blog posts and the video views, but what does come in is a qualified lead who already wants to do something interesting.
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.
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...
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.
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-...
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.
Doing OSS on Github or Tweeting leads to more business opportunities in my mind.
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.
- 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/
But, people _have_ actually read it, which is nice. I've hired at least one person through my blog (he emailed me after reading it), and he was awesome to work with. A lot of coworkers have messaged me saying "hey, I was googling for this problem I'm having, and I found your blog, and I realized you work at the company, so thank you!" I've benefited so much from reading developer blogs throughout my career, so it's nice to be able to give back and help others too.
I think it's helped me get better at technical writing and show employers that I can do more than just write code too.
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.
Initially free, the blog eventually became paid and grew into a very active WhatsApp group of over 700+ members.
This week, something that started as a personal blog is evolving into a product for me.
The blog helped me in many ways: - Increased learning by actively looking for newer topics and exploring more about them
- After having a few users it put pressure and discipline to blog daily
- Led to many interesting conversations and connections
- Give lots of innovative ideas and a boost of confidence
- There are lots of learning on entrepreneurship as well
For those who might be interested, I maintain it here: http://everydayseries.com/blog/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use my blog as a personal wiki and notebook, and have well over 20 years of content in there (check out this page link graph: https://taoofmac.com/static/graph), so I invariably end up posting stuff that is useful to me as reference, and that kind of feedback loop definitely helps with learning (or at least keeping track of) things.
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.
Most middle managers will not hire someone with a fledging YouTube channel or a popular blog or a weaponisable Twitter following unless the role is a public facing PR role (devrel etc).
The thing is, there is no way to know about or count the lost opportunities. Grey man strategy (i.e. not early 2000s "build a personal brand" strategy) is safest for most people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back in 1984, I wrote a BBS for a Vic-20. It had multiple rooms (message areas) which users could create and make public or private, private email and an online game, all in 9.6K of BASIC. It was very popular with each user spending an average of 70 minutes on it. One of my users hired me as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic can program!"
Thirty years later, that same guy wanted me to work with him at Google.
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
Because platforms (like MySpace) can disappear almost overnight, I would always recommend setting up a blog on a domain that you own and control. Mine is https://markgreville.ie and i have been on the front page of HackerNews a couple of times. I have had lot of people reach out to me over the years, including some very famous tech luminaries (people who’s books i read from cover to cover as i was learning to be a programmer, then architect, then leader). I have also found a lot of great talent through it.
My struggle initially was worrying that i would seem pompous for writing publicly, and that no-one would find any of it interesting. However, most of my friends ignored it, and i found a community on HN that was my tribe instead.
If you are reading this and haven’t blogged before 1. Register a domain now 2. Set up a simple site (Wordpress will do for now, don't over think this bit) 3. Write about something you have done, or something you are passionate about 4. Have a trusted person read it for you and take feedback 5. Edit, publish, and post on HN 6. Start the next post
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.
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.
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.
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.
Especially https://www.nieknijland.nl/trips this page, where I log my past trips.
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.
Thanks to it I managed to teach a gamedev course in a college. The students there wanted a gamedev course and they could propose it to their faculty. I wrote a syllabus, and as simple as that I could start teaching them. I did it for about 3 years before I moved countries. I also taught a computer graphics course.
Also thanks to it I had enough clout to organise a game jam, Caracas Game Jam. 15 years later it's still being done by a group of volunteers, and has helped many enthusiasts to find their place in gamedev (or simply find out it wasn't really their thing).
Yes, I am really grateful for my blog :)
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My personal website is a different story (https://www.ciroduran.com) I've had it for slightly longer, it's become more of an archive and a personal blog, and it's fully bilingual, which makes a bit harder to write content for. The stack has changed a lot: from Joomla, to Drupal, to Wordpress, to the current Jekyll-generated static website.
I'm still happy about it. I find it ironic that I can still download and play an adventure game I made for Windows in 2003, and that my much-more prolific Flash games are dead in a browser.
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.
I had a fitness blog on Blogger between 2008-2011. I was a part time fitness instructor. I found it relatively useless. By then, normal people stopped going to random websites. I started posting everything to Facebook and I had a lot more engagement and virality.
I stopped teaching in 2012 after getting married. Fast forward to 2019, my wife got into the fitness industry and I see how it has changed - YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
The “aggregators” have taken over.
From a tech perspective, if I cared about my “brand”, it would be to set myself up for independent cloud consulting. I would be trying to establish myself as a “thought leader” by posting vapid crap on LinkedIn and Twitter.
The department I work for at $BigTech (consulting) does have a very easy open source approval process that allows us to publish our “reusable artifacts” from consulting projects on to their open source GitHub organization with an MIT license and then we can fork it under our own profile. I do take advantage of that to have sone type of public presence.
If I were to start a career focus blog, I would host it on Micro.blog and talk about my open source work.
I have a blog there now that’s more of a public journal than anything else. My wife and I will be “digital nomadding” flying across the US for the foreseeable future every March -September. I really don’t care about “engagement” or if anyone actually sees it. If I wanted to showboat about our travels I would post to FB and Instagram.
The highlights have been John Baez commenting on one page how beautiful the images were, and Jugu Abraham (Indian movie critic) thanking me for linking to pages on his site. Am still considering getting rid of comments though—even though it's handled automatically, they're about 99.99% spam.
One thing I learned is that my pages on the most obscure subjects get the most hits! Two in particular are super-obscure and get hits almost every day. I guess there's no other pages on the web about those topics. That maybe seems obvious, but was surprising. It's hard not to assume a piece of writing has to be on a popular topic for someone to want to read it.
[0] http://amasci.com/faq.html#hits the whole page is a great read, as is the whole site. So much great stuff.
Social media was unheard of at that time. News sites and blogs were primary sources of information. I set up a WordPress blog to collect and disseminate critical information.
Spending 4-5 hours every day, I compiled information about relief efforts and rehabilitation activities. There was a section for missing persons too.
The blog was mentioned in the publications like the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNBC etc. It remained at number one spot in search engines for quite some time.
But it was the comments and emails from those who found hope in the midst of the chaos that truly fueled my drive. I heard from people who had reunited with their loved ones, others who received vital on-ground aid, and still others who found ways to lend a helping hand.
Though my blog may now be archived, the memory of those days still lingers on. For in that moment of crisis, I found the strength to make a difference, and my efforts brought light into the lives of so many.
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.
I used to write on Blogger.com. One time when I was attending a team meeting of a new startup in town, junior devs were asking me that they really enjoyed reading about my college experience which I have posted about on my blog. I never expected this but writing sparingly had made having conversation easier for me few times.
I recently did a consolidation and merged 3 of my different blogs into https://bhupalsapkota.com.np (tech, writings and short poems on my native language). This move was inspired by Seth Godin as he recommends frequently about publishing on your own domain.
My friends at college back in the days (2006) loved my short poems and whenever I had a new post it'd be a topic of the day in uni. Good memories.
I am hoping to write more coz I enjoy writing. But, I struggle with ideas and topics. Any suggestions how do you keep up?
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writing forces me to break things down into manageable chunks. I’ve seen much more consistent progress this way.
Whenever I have a problem at work, or feel insecure, I say to myself – hey, at least people like my pictures!
That got me thinking: Why not write a whole book about a tech topic I enjoy? So, I started doing that. It took about seven years, but the positive feedback from my blogging gave me inspiration.
And the process of writing something up is always great for making sure I know what I'm talking about. I want to write a paragraph about a certain aspect, but it's only then that I realize that I'm not actually sure about it. So I investigate more until I'm sure.
And don't underestimate the value of a library of blob posts. When someone asks you to explain something you can reply that while you're perfectly happy to have a chat about it, you actually have a blog post about it that should give them a good understanding.
I've found that people really appreciate getting such a complete answer, and (since your question seems to focus on value you get) helps you become known as "the expert". Like "hey, do you know if it's possible to do X?" -- "Oh yeah, here's a step by step guide".
And a blog is a better memory than your brain. You'll find yourself remembering knowing something, but no longer knowing it. With a blog you can just go back to the past you that was an expert in this, and refresh your memory.
You won't get the value from the first post alone. But after a while the value adds up. It's like how you don't get stronger from one day at the gym, but from putting in the time.
People reading my blog have also commented or emailed me with more info, or questions, and I've later met them at conferences and even jobs, and we'd have further chats on the topic.
Writing a blog post can mark the end of a small project, so is a motivator, too.
Led to jobs: check. Increased learning: absolutely check. Brought new connections: check. Vanity: No more than a job well done, and feeling useful to others, or at least future me.
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-...
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!
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.
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
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.
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
A blog has also made interviews substantially easier, which is great.
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.
Unlike many other HN users in this thread, I've never directly benefited from my blog. But I have used my blog to help other people (many of them furries) get into the tech industry. So I'd argue that counts for something.
(I wrote a series called Furward Momentum if you're curious how.)
The main reason why I don't benefit from my blog is because I don't want to. I write for my own amusement, because I enjoy writing.
I occasionally have to turn down the bold recruiter, and frequently get harassed by people looking to pay for a product endorsement or "guest post". (I've asked them for writing samples "in my style" and rejected them for not putting enough furries in it, but that joke loses novelty fast.)
Personal websites can help, if they're looking for more of a thought leader than a pair of coding hands.
My CV is two pages long, and it's still too long, recruiters don't read it, probably just look at the keywords or IDK how they work. Previous version was 17 pages long, it was a bad conception (just listed projects, etc., as described in the book, of 30+ years).
But if you look at my GitHub page, you can get a far better picture. I only have my own repos, so you get a relatively good idea of what I do, how I work (most of my projects have documentation, tests), what quality code I write, even if the picture is a bit biased, because of some non-public and of course work projects are not included.
I've gotten several consulting gigs and met some lovely people because of my sites. I got my current job because an executive ran across one of my sites, then tracked me down on LinkedIn. That's the second one I've gotten because of them.
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. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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!
For many, having a personal website or blog can serve as a platform to share their thoughts, ideas or expertise on a particular topic, and this can lead to increased exposure and visibility in their field. This, in turn, can help open up new job opportunities or collaborations.
Additionally, creating content for a personal website or blog can also foster a commitment to learning and self-improvement, as it encourages individuals to stay informed about their areas of interest and to continually develop their skills in these areas.
GPT4:
1. Exposure and Visibility: Having a personal website/blog can increase your online presence, making you more visible to potential employers, clients, and networking opportunities. Your website can act as an online resume, showcasing your skills, experience, and projects.
2. Job Opportunities: A well-maintained blog can attract job offers, especially if the content you post is relevant to your industry and demonstrates your expertise. Employers may notice your work and reach out to you regarding potential job opportunities.
3. Networking: A personal website can help you connect with like-minded professionals in your field. By creating content relevant to your niche, you can attract an audience interested in the same topics and build connections with them.
4. Personal Branding: A website/blog helps you establish your personal brand, which can make you distinguishable in the job market. Your online presence can become synonymous with your area of expertise, making you a go-to option in your field.
5. Increased Learning: Writing blog posts can help you learn and solidify your understanding of various topics within your field. Researching and composing articles about your industry can increase your knowledge and make you more well-informed overall.
6. Monetization: You can use your blog to generate additional income through advertising, sponsored content, or affiliate marketing. Some people can even turn their blogs into full-time businesses.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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
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
- 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.
zachbellay.com -- if you're curious
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.
I started my first blog, ShortFormBlog, in 2009. At the time, I was a fully print journalist, focused on graphic design. I had just been laid off from one newspaper and was about to be hired by another. The thing that made the blog stand out at the time is that I tried to bring some of that news-design mindset to the blog.
Within three years, I had had a number of notable experiences emerge because of this blog, including:
- A regular freelance gig with AOL News
- Interviews with a number of prominent outlets for potential jobs, including the then-buzzy iPad newspaper The Daily, PBS, and BuzzFeed
- Nominated for a Shorty Award
- A large follower base on Tumblr (160k by the time I stopped)
- Transition to a new, fully digital full-time job, outside of newspapers, in which I was allowed to keep the blog going
I eventually moved to a newsletter format called Tedium, which moved away from daily news into more evergreen styles of content. That led to:
- An appearance on NPR’s Planet Money
- Syndication opportunities with Atlas Obscura, Fast Company, and Nieman Lab, among others
- An ongoing freelance relationship with Motherboard, along with freelance opportunities in other places
- A consistent revenue model
- The opportunity to bring in outside writers
- Periodic viral posts (including one last year, written by a contributor to the site, that was name-dropped by Rick Beato)
- A smaller but more deeply interested audience
- A chance to meet a lot of people who are into the same weird stuff I'm into
- A frequent outlet to write about whatever's on my mind
I have now been writing at a regular pace on the internet for about 14 and a half years. I have learned a lot over that time. My recommendation to you is that you find your pacing, and if something is not working, you switch gears.
I've found the benefits of writing at a blog to be much more intrinsic (I practice every day). Sure, it did lay the groundwork for my career in tech marketing, but it also keeps me in the groove of "just writing"—easier said than done, and it makes me much happier. More here:
https://herbertlui.net/what-my-personal-website-and-blog-hav...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://fredlybrand.com/2020/03/21/personal-credentials-on-p...
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...
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.
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.
* Some of my new colleagues admitted reading my posts when searching for something. * I was confident linking my (commercial) book in a subreddit in which I post useful and free articles.
2. Improving as a writer.
* You need to write to improve writing (obvious). * Better writing helped me to write and publish a technical book.
3. Marketing.
* I used my blog as a main marketing channel for my book when I released it.
Note that I haven't started for those reasons per-se. I started long time ago to simple share knowledge on the internet.
I also keep wikis on those sites for more interconnected information.
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.
- Some form of "marketing" or "exposure" to the inconsequential side projects that you do and probably thought no one really cares about
- Some small amount of internet money ~$10/month enough for the site to pay for itself from AdSense
- Expert networking gigs ($100 to $200/hour). Basically, they connect you with their clients on consult about a certain topic. These are rare though. I've only done 2/7 successful arrangements so far.
I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat.
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.
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.
It helps me gather my thoughts well. This is just a private blog, hosted on my local PC ...
I use this: https://github.com/guilt/mblog
I do write about some things on my public blog. It happens every few years.
Feel free to check it out: https://dustinbrett.com/
If you’re curious, it’s an about me with project history: https://martijnhols.nl/
(https://blog.markshead.com/869/state-machines-computer-scien...)
Definitely improving my SQL though because I'll often put a query in a blog post, think "that's ugly", and find an improved way of doing things to make it look "nicer".
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."
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.
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)
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.
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.
It led to some learning I would probably have done in any case.
Plus having my own domains (at pair.com) gives me much more control over my email, without having to manage my own smtp server.
However it feels a bit like nostalgia. Nowadays everything is drowned in SEO-spam. My advice would be to maintain a blog if you find it fun to write. I find it useful because it helps me structure my thoughts.
In addition the specific post about my ankle fracture is somehow one of the most popular when searching for "ankle fracture blog", and I've had at least one person reach out to me who also had a fracture and were comforted by my account.
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.
If someone else finds it useful, that's even better ;D.
- 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
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.
I know most work deserves to be money driven. But I love how the programming community keeps this social-driven effort. Hope people never stop writing great blog/articles just to keep the art of programming growing.
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.
I now am selling the domain because some celebrity gamer in south korea has that exact match name as my nickname domain and twitter handle.
I was offered 40k a year ago but declined.
But the best surprise is that my personal blog occasionally showed up when I was doing a google search years after writing a post.
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 :)
Building a brand: A website or blog can help individuals or businesses build their brand by establishing a digital presence and showcasing their expertise in a particular field.
Generating leads: Websites and blogs can be used to attract and generate leads for products or services. By creating content that resonates with their target audience, businesses can attract potential customers and convert them into paying customers.
Sharing knowledge: Individuals can use websites and blogs to share their knowledge and expertise with others. By creating and publishing valuable content, they can establish themselves as thought leaders and gain a following.
Making money: Some people use websites and blogs as a source of income. They may generate revenue through advertising, affiliate marketing, or by selling products or services.
In summary, a website or blog can serve many purposes, including building a brand, generating leads, sharing knowledge, and making money.
It also helped me remove writing blocks because I intentionally time-box my posts.
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 :)
Keep meaning to start a blog but haven't gotten around to.
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.
Nothing, but it helped many people to get started with something or fix problems for themselves.
I also hope that it will be a nice addition to my resume.
Life in general when you are older with kids makes it almost impossible.
I wouldn't have been referred to my current job without it.
I'm not an academic, so it's quite the complement.
But that's not why I contribute to them :)
not jobs for me, aside from the learning. I've had great backchannels that never let me skip the technical interview or bent the any rules.
---
I grew up and lived in México most of my life.
Back in 2014 I was a consultant working in Accenture México. 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.
Non of them gave me a job directly though.
Art station is a very recent thing :)