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

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

- 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.

A former co-worker used to have a shop on Cherokee Street about 15 years ago. He told me that a neighboring building had access to the caves through the basement, though its owner was too afraid to explore it.