281–290 of 314 posts
Can I just say I'm so envious of all of you who are able to write publicly without worries? I did try to start a blog many, many years ago, but I can never get over my fears that whatever I put out publicly will inevitably be used against me, by someone with power, in one way or another. (Yes, including this comment.)
Can I just say I'm so envious of all of you who are able to write publicly without worries? I did try to start a blog many, many years ago, but I can never get over my fears that whatever I put out publicly will inevitably be used against me, by someone with power, in one way or another. (Yes, including this comment.)
Writers aren't necessarily writing without worries. Some are merely more afraid of the consequences of not writing.
This, I think, is almost always worth it. All the other stuff is a welcome positive externality.
For example, readership:
- I don't write for an audience, rather to sort my thoughts out, so I don't mind "looking stupid" or being wrong.
- My writing is longform, without regard to "snappiness" or whatever people believe gets content distribution in a world of chopped up attention spans.
- I don't have analytics or tracking of any kind, and so it's been such a pleasant surprise to hear from strangers that they read the blog and _like_ it!
- Also, https://xkcd.com/386/ "Duty calls" is real, and I've had the nicest conversations by being wrong (or obtuse)!
Here's how it got started... like all civilized blogging re-starts, it is a long apology https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/ :)
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edit: missed a point
I've been writing online for almost 10 years now https://podviaznikov.com/writings The best part for me is receiving some random emails from time to time with people saying they liked my post or poem or something else. I don't have expectations for those letters though. Intentionally I don't have google analytics on my site. When I did have it, it influenced how and what I was writing. Now I just write for myself. An…
Also, I love the simplicity of your site. Cheers!
I have been blogging since before it was called that. I wrote a post about using the A* algorithm for path finding in games. The included code was used by quite a few game companies, some of whom I ended up working for. Recently I expanded the blog to include video which has been a learning experience for me. Mostly I do this stuff for my own entertainment but it has had a pronounced effect on my career. People don’t…
:D
Can I just say I'm so envious of all of you who are able to write publicly without worries? I did try to start a blog many, many years ago, but I can never get over my fears that whatever I put out publicly will inevitably be used against me, by someone with power, in one way or another. (Yes, including this comment.)
This is Raganwald, ( http://raganwald.com ). I'm glad you mentioned both a blog AND a brand. They can go together (as they have done for me), but I honestly get different things out of them. Blogging helped me work out my thoughts on many subjects, not all of which were useful for "building my brand." The brand, on the other hand, helped me build enough personal security to feel safe taking chances like quitting my j…
For real though, I don’t know why should it matter if it leads to a job? What happened to the web? Why is everything… so… selfish on the public internet?
Are we really only left with this site, the Wikipedia and a subset of Reddit where the internet happens now?
From 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 quit my blog and focused on my projects in the dark.