My personal website/blog is my digital outlet as a coder. I love working on it and have had some kind of website since I was 9 years old (which was 27 years ago). When I travelled I blogged a lot but haven't written a new post in years. Instead my site has evolved into my side project where I get to play with the front-end. I plan to keep working on it and doing blog posts for the rest of my life (or the life of the internet).
Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
201–210 of 314 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't match my experience. If a candidate advances far enough that 3-4 of us are going to spend a couple hours of our day interviewing and deliberating, we each will at least scan resume linked blogs.
Of the companies that gave me offers in the last few months, none of them even knew I had github projects until I brought it up with them during the interview process. I mention these github projects on my resume in a separate section - its not even a throwaway line. Personally, if someone has a blog or a Github and I'm conducting an onsite interview with them, I definitely spend an hour or so going over everything.
This is very generous of you and I would appreciate it as a candidate. In my experience, almost nobody does that. I even came across companies that never looked at the portfolios that they had requested in their job ads. One of these companies even hired me! Fun times.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#203My blog is probably the single best thing I’ve ever done for my career.
It hasn’t gotten me a single job. I’ve only changed jobs once in the past 12 years and my blog had no impact on that. My blog helped me learn out to right. How to formalize my thoughts. How to effectively express ideas to peers.
IMHO everyone would be very well served if they improved their writing. A personal brand on that blog may or may not help.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#204Like so many others here, I keep a personal blog.
I like to write up neat projects that I do. The first post on the site actually helped me get my current job. Occasionally I'll also write up other things that cross my mind that I find interesting, such as the most recent climate post.
Working on another one describing the process of automating a greenhouse.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
How long have you used https://montaigne.io/ ? Never heard about it before; very interested. Love the simplicity of your site, by the way.
https://montaigne.io/ is my small project! It's a third iteration of it. For a few years I had following setup: 1. keep files in dropbox 2. sync them and publish automatically using montaigne.io Now I switched and instead of Dropbox I use Apple Notes. Because it's easier to write, and mobile UI is better and it supports tables and images out of the box.
Very cool. How does it work? AFAIK there's no Apple API's for this(?)
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://montaigne.io/ is my small project! It's a third iteration of it. For a few years I had following setup: 1. keep files in dropbox 2. sync them and publish automatically using montaigne.io Now I switched and instead of Dropbox I use Apple Notes. Because it's easier to write, and mobile UI is better and it supports tables and images out of the box.
Cool, I just signed up. Is there no way to change your site's URL once you've picked it in settings? Can you use a custom domain or will it always be x.montaigne.io? The help page is empty - this would be a good place to put FAQs. FYI I'd be willing to pay for something like this as it tears down all excuses for me not to have a blog, and I'm sure many Apple users would share that sentiment.
Yes, it's possible to set custom domain name (email me using at the email in my profile) - it's a manual process for now.
Not possible for now to change default name though! You can either create new site with new name and delete this one (or again, email me).
Agree about FAQ! I started making FAQ https://docs.montaigne.io/faq but didn't finish it yet.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#207Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
YouTube took over that niche. What used to be a blog post is now a 10 minute video.
This is surprising to me, I’d say YouTube videos are harder to produce (and arguably consume) than blog posts. Does anyone know why are we seeing this trend? Is it because of monetization / easier to reach audience / something else?
On monetization it's not even close afaik. Some YouTubers make seven figures, and I don't know that blogging can get there. Although if some bloggers are making seven figures I'd be intrigued. Several YouTubers voluntarily discuss their numbers.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#209Yes, it makes me feel more like a person, even if nobody reads it. It turns my personal investigations into random things into permanent writing, which makes me feel like I'm building something instead of fruitlessly spinning my wheels in solitude.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#210From the hiring side, I always spend time reading people's blogs, Github, or social media if they make an effort to include it on their resume. 9 out of 10 times, blogs are extremely stale content from 5+ years back. A lot of people start blogging at the beginning of their careers and then just stop. This creates a weird frozen-in-time effect where what's shown on their blog doesn't match their current skillset at al…
The trend to remove dates from blog posts is problematic for just this reason (as well as being reader-hostile).
I feel like words have lost all meaning when we're calling removing a date from a blog article "hostile." It's only so for non-evergreen content, anyway. There's plenty of technical content that is just as relevant today even though it was written 2, 5, 10 years ago.
Edit for clarification: By no means am I saying that it's bad to have dates, or that we shouldn't have them. They make sense a lot of times, it's just kind of silly to call it hostile to the reader.