Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

Website: Point of contact.

I don't use social media, so if people search for me, they can find my website.

Blog: To ventilate and network.

My blog posts have landed me job interviews and have expanded my professional network.

But I mostly blog because I write a lot. I write to myself, and sometimes I think it's valuable to others, and then I have a place where I can share that and link to it. For example, when my colleagues make sketchy code, and I can't find a good place that explains why you want to think about it differently, I'll write a blog post.

In my interview for my current position, the team mentioned some elements of my website in a positive light, so I think it helped me stand out a bit.

Otherwise it's just good for bookmarking links and ideas that I'd otherwise forget about. And it's handy to link to friends if they ask me about my hobbies, e.g. "here's what I remember about X off the top of my head, but if you want more details and links to reference material, there's a section dedicated to it on my website."

I wrote some technical articles on Dwyer.co.za. Mainly for fun. Partly because I wanted to 'give back'. Partly because I found the articles a good way for me to learn stuff and often found myself referring back to them later.

I got inbound leads from people asking me to write similar articles for them and a book deal. I started charging small amounts at first and then larger ones later on.

Now its my full time business (ritza.co) that pays me a better salary than I was earning as a full time employee and supports several team members.

I would say having a blog can easily be life changing, but is worthwhile even without that just for the personal growth aspect.

I love this answer. You just convinced me to start a blog.

This is actually pretty fitting, but I had been looking for a new job and working to polish my site into a better portfolio. I had written a piece about "The Future of Group Messaging" that I had worked really hard on, and once I finished it, I posted it on HN, fully intending to reach out to recruiters to find work. However, it ended up gaining a lot of traction on HN, and from that post, I received about 25 inbound job offers that I was able to choose from.

I still think back to how stressed I was while building the site, and I thought it was such a waste of time. But it got me the job I needed at the time and opened a lot of doors for me. That said, I could theoretically attribute it to HN and my writing, though the custom site helped.