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

I've been blogging in some form for ~18 years - https://caseysoftware.com/ - and use it to put out ideas that are fueled by my day job or just generally document things that I've thought through and made sense of.

At least 3-4 times/month, when someone asks me something, I have a blog post written in that area and I send it to them. The credibility shift between "here's my email answer" and "here's a blog post" is HUGE and people take it much more seriously.

The vast majority of developers out there don't write at all, let alone regularly. Even writing a handful of times per year will make your writing better and put you in a higher tier of devs.

And finally, our very own Patio11 talks about this (and me) in this post: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/do-not-en...

> I have a few friends who are developer evangelists, which is a funny job created at API companies where your brief is basically "Go demo our product to a group of developers. Now, do that again, every day, for the next several years." Sentiment on the actual job is decidedly mixed. Keith Casey gives a pretty good account here.

> (Side note: I'd be remiss if I didn't note that Keith just got his work shared with 10,000 people because Keith did the work and made it easily shareable, and also because Keith knew me, through his previous job at Twilio. I'm a customer there. Everyone can play six degrees to Kevin Bacon in our industry, but actually putting in the work makes it much more likely that other people will play six degrees on your behalf.)

This is the post he links to: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/developer-evangelism-the-whol...

https://gerikson.com/m/2022/04/index.html#2022-04-28_thursda...

I based it off this solution, which is both in Perl and Python!

https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog>

The main draw for me is that the entries are in fortune file format (delimited by %) which means I just append to a file as a thought occurs.

1) Writing forces me to think through things clearly and when doing things like walkthoughs I often find things where my understanding wasn't quite right, so it helps there.

2) I often return to things I wrote a while back where I can't remember the details of a specific topic.

3) I appreciate when other people take the time to explain things, nothing like finding a good blog post when you're researching a topic, so this is my part of helping out.

4) Getting the odd message from someone saying they appreciate something I've written about is nice :)

5) It's helped my career. I now work in a field where I'm paid at least partly to write (security advocacy), and I've had companies approach me to talk about jobs based on them having read something I wrote.

In terms of the tech. I use, I keep it super simple. Jekyll and GitHub pages, so there's no server maintenance, just write markdown and publish.

Apple Notes is a gem.