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Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

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Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#21

Absolutely, yes. My blog ( https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com ) is primarily a way for me to share teaching material around React, Redux, JS, and TS. Most of my blog posts have been written in response to questions other folks have asked that I've answered repeatedly. It gives me a way to write a longer answer _once_, and share it going forward. A few top examples: - "A (Mostly)" Complete Guide to React Rendering Beha…

I can confirm that your posts, tweets and replies in reddit/hn are helpful to people like myself

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#22
Yes (my blog is on my profile).

People email me about things I’m interested in, and I’ve made new friends through it too.

It's nice to look back and see my progress — taking on harder projects, and writing more clearly.

> Does the time spent writing feels worth it to you?

Yes but I've always enjoyed writing.

> Did it help to get noticed/ find jobs or other opportunities?

Yes.

> Do you learn something new from it?

Yes, by writing for it. And, I suppose, by "running it" I learned more about the frameworks I've used.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#23
Worth? Yes, in terms of self-confidence maybe (when it gets referenced in other places) and some other times it's helpful venting. But I don't believe it has influenced my career in any direction. And as I blog about actual experiences, I don't learn anything new from the act of blogging. All in all, yeah, valuable, but not enough to make it worth more effort.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#25
I have a personal blog on Blogger. It's zero work to maintain but I mostly publish on a platform where I have an editor who also handles promotion etc. I have more flexibility on my own platform but honestly I have more demand to write professionally in places that will handle editing/promotion/etc. than I have time for and I have more reach there.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#26
post #24

> Personal Not in this day and age when you might lose a job if they find out you support Trump or aren't on-board with progressive egregores. Too much risk.

I did everything under my real name up until last year, this is why I stopped. I remember being told over and over again never to use my real name on the internet. I wonder why we stopped telling people that, it was a good idea.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#27
I have been writing for my personal blog now for a year. The time spend writing and editing does feel worth it. My writing is a lot better than it was a year ago.

It helped me to get noticed at my work and to make new connections.

You will always learn something about the stuff you write. To write better, some new way of doing something, or something from the comments.

I run my blog through cloudflare pages. I only have to push a new markdown file to github and the Hugo template and cloudflare do the rest. Took only a few hours to setup correctly.

Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

#30
It's worth it for me in the sense that I blog to process my thoughts, learnings, projects, and experiences. Blogging helps me do that, and since that's the point, it's worth it.

In terms of getting noticed/finding jobs, my blog (https://liza.io) is not super high traffic or anything. I don't market it. I don't even usually tweet about my new posts, even though Twitter is my one active social media platform. But I have had recruiters mention checking out my blog posts and sometimes reference my blog content. I've also had interviewers mention my blog and ask about personal projects I've written about in the past. I also used some of my blog articles as supporting material when applying for a position that featured a lot of technical writing. So I think that even though improving job prospects is not the primary goal of my personal blog, it has been a bonus.

Another bonus has been getting occasional emails and comments from random readers to say a certain post has helped them. A while back I wrote a post about testing external API calls in Go, and have had a few people reach out to thank me. Though I write primarily for myself, it's always nice to see when someone stumbles across my content and appreciates it.

It's also always cool when a post ends up in newsletters I've never heard of. I don't have a consistent way to detect each time this happens, but can sometimes trace back traffic through a referrer or notice a backlink from a newsletter archive.

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