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

I started a personal blog two years ago, roughly. Even if nobody had read it, I'd feel successful, because I only write about things I'm confused about or learned recently. Then I can link them to my coworkers and they get an exact guide about this particular issue.

But, people _have_ actually read it, which is nice. I've hired at least one person through my blog (he emailed me after reading it), and he was awesome to work with. A lot of coworkers have messaged me saying "hey, I was googling for this problem I'm having, and I found your blog, and I realized you work at the company, so thank you!" I've benefited so much from reading developer blogs throughout my career, so it's nice to be able to give back and help others too.

I think it's helped me get better at technical writing and show employers that I can do more than just write code too.

When I was laid off, and all my access to internal systems was disabled, I had no way to get in touch with my former colleagues, who didn’t have my contact info. Having a personal website enabled them to get in touch with me, which led to a number of job offers (including the one I ended up taking).

> I recall someone saying the following in a conference, which stuck with me (paraphrasing): "If you write something down and nobody ever reads it, those keypresses are sort of wasted."

Only if you are looking at objective contribution to the world/conversation. What you don't see, and is not measurable by clicks or page-views or any other kind of real metric, is how you changed yourself by writing.

As others have notice, when you write something, your are practicing -- no, developing -- your writing and language skills and you are re-inforcing your understanding of the subject (why do you think teachers made you write essays at school/uni/college? Not so they can grade you, but so you learn).

It taught me how much I do not want to use AWS for personal reasons. In fact, I wouldn't even build a revenue business on it.

A few years ago, a friend gifted me a domain name, and simultaneously, I signed up to AWS so I could goof around with all the free-tier cloud features, and basically just learn some cloud architecting.

I quickly settled on the Bitnami image of a MediaWiki stack on top of Ubuntu. It was fairly easy to get set up, but of course I quickly realized why the average Joe does not want to do this sort of thing. I had to be my own sysadmin, which I knew fairly well, but I also had to be my own CISO, and the logistics of running a bare OS on a VM on the public Internet are definitely daunting in the 2020s.

I attracted futile probes of my ssh port and I also attracted some sort of spammers to create throwaway MediaWiki accounts. In fact, the aforementioned friend showed me a few security holes in my MW configuration, and I was thankful he did it and not some malicious stranger.

Eventually, MW failed in some perplexing way, and I was frankly appalled at the myriad ways that AWS costs could literally get out of control and I'd have a 5-figure monthly bill with little recourse. I pulled out completely and shut it all down, after a few months had elapsed.

All in all, it was a good experiment, and really not disastrous; I did accomplish the learning of various cloud administration techniques, so I appreciated that. I don't miss the crazy opaque billing. There was so much more to learn. Perhaps someday.

The Input font family by David Jonathan Ross focuses on monospace programming fonts, but it also contains a nice sans-serif font that kind of has a similar aesthetic. I’m not a typeface person, so I know I’m not explaining it very well. The homepage has tons of samples if you scroll down: https://djr.com/input

It’s one of my favorite fonts for code, but I also used Input Sans as a font for writing in Obsidian and Ulysses for a while. It was very good!