Haven't found the time to blog recently. Free time is scarce with family. Haven't had a reason/desire to prioritize blogging - but if you enjoy it, go for it!
Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
221–230 of 314 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#222Has anyone incurred any negative effects due to blogging? Here is a hypothetical scenario, you and your co-workers are working long hours on solving a bug; and during that weekend you publish a blog entry you have been working for a long time, and the blog entry becomes some what popular. Now your manager and co-workers think your mindshare is not focused on work and you are not dedicated to work as others. Is it bet…
Doesn’t sound like a healthy environment if doing things besides working is ever something to be feared. If that’s the case, blogging specifically doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#223It'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 h…
Nice blog! Your simple layout coincidentally shares some resemblance to mine (https://leite.dev), and I thought that was neat.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#224I've found it worth doing. My blog (xeiaso.net, formerly christine.website) is the main way that I get employed at this point. It also helps that people link it here a lot. After 100 articles or so writing got a lot easier and now people rely on my blog for a lot of things. I think it's worth it, but I've also been exclusively self-hosting it. I currently have the code (and writing) open source on GitHub ( https://gi…
Your blog looks awesome! a) People who copy blogs could copy anything public.. correct? That shouldn't stop you from blogging. OR b) By copying, did you mean they are forking your git repo & hosting it with a wrapper on top of your content? I'm assuming it is (b) you are worried about.
Forking a repo is lot easier than scraping a blog and then re-hosting it. I think it's most probably (b) that OP is talking about.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#225I blog about electronics at tomverbeure.github.io. I find it incredibly useful, not for others but primarily for myself.
I see 2 major benefits:
- I blog about things that I didn't really know about in-depth earlier. Just writing down the words to explain things to others often makes me realize that there were aspects that I didn't quite understand. I learned a ton of stuff that I wouldn't have without blogging, and it's surprising how some things turn out to be useful at my job.
- I try to maintain a 2-month cadence of blogging about something. (It doesn't always work.) This artificial requirement is a great motivator to force me to finish a project. My blog has 67 git branches. That's 67 topics which are at some stage of completion (often just in the information gathering phase, with a list of web links.) Most will never materialize in a completely blog post, but sometimes I go through them and pick up a topic that I had left behind a long time ago and just finish it.
I use github.io with Jekyll as blogging platform. It's essentially effortless...
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#226No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#227I find it valuable. My blog (sledgeworx.io) started in part as a place for me to add documentation for technical solutions where the answer wasn't already available on stack overflow. It's very handy when somebody on the team asks "How do I do x" and I can send them a link to my blog with exactly how I want them to do x.
I also use it as a bit of a release valve for frustrations I have with the way things often times work poorly in the software world.
Has it produced money, or other opportunities, not yet.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#228I'm starting to realize that I never loved writing, but that the more I do it, the clearer my mind feels. It's something to do with getting ideas out of my mind so they stop bouncing around. Ironically, I find I like writing more now that I only write about things that interest me. I think school f*cked me up there.
So, I'm writing loosely and when I remember too. Eventually I will have enough to piece together a few blog posts and imagine more momentum will build from there. So I guess the key is patience.
It's really hard to understand how much work goes into blogs when you just see a bunch of finished products that people have poured into. But I think it's worth it for the cathartic, mind-clearing effects I have described.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#229I have had a blog for many years now but I rarely treat it as a way to market myself or gain anything from it except the fact that I can go back and look at something I was working on.
At some point, I started writing more about keyboards, nothing crazy, just some I was interested in or when I built my own keyboard and I decided to track all the expenses related to it. It also helped me quickly go back to it and share the build process with friends whenever they asked about it.
My blog: https://blog.usmanity.com
The biggest struggle for me has been to write consistently, I will have a few days in a row when I write and then I go silent. Looking for any input/feedback on how people maintain cadence on writing.
Re: Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?
#230> Does the time spent writing feels worth it to you?
Absolutely. For me it's mostly a tool to get thoughts out of my head and also to "think in public" in a way. It's useful to put thought out there because people can pick them up and help you move your thinking forward by interacting with what you published.
> Did it help to get noticed/ find jobs or other opportunities?
A few but I don't write about my job for the most part because it a personal blog and not a work blog.
> Do you learn something new from it?
That internet strangers are—for the most part—a lot kinder that we might think. I've been blogging on my manuelmoreale.com for more than 5 years and I only had very pleasurable exchanges via email with people around the world. Not one that I regret and I got to learn from other people's experiences. Which is awesome.