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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?

#51

Post by gwbas1c »

I don't blog much. Maybe 1-2 articles a year if I'm lucky. A lot of my attempts end up half-finished, and never published. (I just have too many other interests and get tired in the evening.)

BUT: What really made a personal blog worth it for me was writing my own blog engine as a learning project. I hadn't done much in the Node.js stack, so I wrote my own blog engine to run in Heroku. Maybe if I have some downtime between jobs I'll do it again, too.

My blog engine isn't anything special; but it achieved my goals: To get a feel for Node.js and the general state of web development in April-May 2020: https://github.com/GWBasic/z3

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

#52

Post by memorable »

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

Yes. Writing about my life and let people know it is pretty cool.

- Did it help to get noticed/find jobs or other oppotunities?

Maybe not right now, but it has helped me gather a very small group of people who is interested in my work.

- Do you learn something new from it?

Perhaps not much, but writing and sharing it makes the entire thing worth it IMO.

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

#54

Post by theandrewbailey »

Yes, I've been blogging for over 11 years.

No one has ever wanted to hire me because of it.

Yes, I have learned things from it. Sometimes I like to experiment with web features that I don't or can't at work. Over the past 5 years, I've been carefully considering what I write in blog posts, and it has forced me to research and reflect more on what I write. Even though it's mostly notes and thoughts on whatever videogame I've just finished playing, I think that blogging has improved my writing overall, from work emails to HN comments.

https://theandrewbailey.com/

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

#55

Post by lbriner »

It does depend why you want to do it and what you are posting.

If it is just opinions about stuff, probably not worth the effort unless you are the top of your field and your opinions are worth something (mine aren't!)

If you want to get noticed, it might help but in general I think that only happens if you have a niche. I got invited to speak at two dev conferences and part of that was because of my blog.

If you are blogging things that took you time to find out then that probably means other people will also struggle so your blog post can save them lots of time. In these types of posts, I try to copy error messages exactly so people find articles through Google.

I think it is also useful to practice writing generally, a blog is as good as medium as any.

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

#56

Post by syntaxfree »

I have a blog that doesn’t get that much traffic but is easy to find on Google (and I use the same pseudonym on GitHub which is work visible). I’d say it’s “off brand” (I’m supposed to be a business consultant on data wadda wadda wacca) but it’s kind of a negative I think.

I might as well spam it. asemic-horizon.com would you trust a digital transformation / AI project to the man in that blog.

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

#57

Post by briggers »

Absolutely yes.

I write fairly deep ML performance tuning articles at https://paulbridger.com and the (many) hours I've spent on each article have been hugely worth it.

Many people reach out to me via this work, and when we talk they already see me as an expert or already want to work with me.

I need to blog more, thanks for the reminder.

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

#58

Post by nicolas_t »

whoomp12342 wrote: post #38
nicolas_t wrote: post #31

As a side note, I miss reading blogs from people. I remember 12-14 years ago when google was still useful to find information, I would often stumble onto blogs that had a lot of relevant info. For example when looking for reviews about a private school, I'd see a blog with someone whose kids go to that school, when looking for reviews of a restaurant, I'd see someone with reviews on their blog, etc... Now it seems th…

SEO is much like prioritizing lines of code developed. When you set an arbitrary measure and enforce upon that, you will find that the only thing achieved is that arbitrary measure.

For sure, it also seems to me that at one point Google was still engaged in a game of cat and mouse, trying to detect and block cheaters, changing the algorithm but nowadays it seems they've given up?

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

#59

Post by nicholasbraker »

The question which always comes to mind is this: Is it actually needed in this market where there is a huge demand for IT-staff and you can basically choose from many future employers if you put some effort in it? First of all, kudos for those who are blogging and created some sort of brand out of it, but the reason for me dshould be about sharing knowledge and experiences. Documenting mistakes so you don't make them etc. etc. But in the end it's the actual work you do which is the best brand. No blog/insta/twitterfeed can replace that.. Unpopular opinion and probably culturally influenced but I always find it amusing that my fellow IT crowd in the US (disclaimer: I am Dutch) seem to be focussed on "branding" as if everything needs to be "sold". Everything seems to be a sale to some of them.

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

#60

Post by tomashubelbauer »

I do not have a personal brand online, but I wish I already had it and I will hopefully put more effort towards attaining one in the future. I am determined to do this because it feels like the best way to protect myself from ageism in the future.

To get known within a niche I am interested in would mean I would have a wider array of opportunities to choose from and would give me a leg up towards other candidates or among fellow contractors as I get older and face the possibility of ageism. That's what I tell myself anyway.

It seems to me that in our industry eventually older developers who won't go into management are forced to go solo or to settle at a job they don't like or that doesn't utilize their full potential just because of its security. This seems like a trap that I am looking to proactively avoid and having a personal brand seems like a great tool to achieve that.

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