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Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

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Re: Have a personal web site

#151

Post by caymanjim »

I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk your ear off about the places I've been and the things I've done, but if I'm objective about it, none of it is particularly praiseworthy, and it's hardly going to make me stand out to a potential employer. Any attempt to dramatize my life or skills is going to reek of pomposity, even the rare bits that are somewhat unique.

I'm not a designer. I'm not a visual person. Any attempt to fashionably describe myself is going to backfire. My resume is a good overview of my skills and experience, but if I try to turn that into an online portfolio, it's not going to be any more impressive. If I don't keep it up to date, and remodel it constantly to keep up with contemporary fashions, it's going to make me look old and out of touch.

I have an exceedingly common first and last name, so I'm hard for employers to find online. I'm happy about this. I don't want employers scrutinizing my social media presence, as benign as it is. I would never give a potential employer any of my online IDs if they asked.

If you've got something to say or show and you want your own home page, go for it. I don't think most people actually have enough interesting content to warrant it, though, and I'm pretty sure that I don't.

Re: Have a personal web site

#152

Post by jeremyjh »

hnarayanan wrote: post #148
keerthiko wrote: post #114

The saddest part about personal websites now is that if someone googles your name, your presence on social media sites, an about page of a project or company you worked for, or any news outlet article where your name is mentioned will rank first and ahead of any personal website. I understand if one's full name combination is too common to show every personal website, but I feel like if a unique name is googled, or t…

I can provide a counter example to this. Searching for my full name (and for many years my first name) has always resulted in my personal website being the top link. It's not SEO, it's just age. I am an old man with an old school website that's happened to have been up for a long time.

I have a ten year old personal website that does not appear to be indexed by google at all anymore. There was an article about this that made the front page, that some old websites are being dropped from the index. If you search my name from duck duck go its the first hit.

Re: Have a personal web site

#153

Post by intertextuality »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #61

I don't judge a person's technical skill through this metric (or at least I make an attempt not to), but it's rather noticeable when someone has nothing going on online. A blank GitHub, no website, no projects, etc. For an employed person, eh, whatever, maybe they just have a life. But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracur…

This is an unbelievable attitude.

"Oh so you call yourself a mechanic, huh? Well you aren't blogging about cars and mechanic-related things in your free time, so I'm suspicious".

"Oh, an architect, huh? You don't have an online presence, which is worrying".

I'm baffled as to why people expect programmers to spend most of their time behind a computer, and to make social git commits or blog about it on top of that.

I program professionally. It's true that I sometimes program after work on personal projects and write for my blog, but I also devote my time to studying Korean, and Japanese kanji. I also draw, spend time with friends, or occasionally play videogames. Programming is exhausting and oftentimes the last thing I want to do is look at code or write about it after work.

And of course, people have things like kids or other responsibilities in their life. College students may have extracurricular activities or work. Not every college student has oodles of free time as you so broadly assume.

We shouldn't have to justify NOT blogging or pushing to github. How dare I have any interests outside of computers and programming. Blegh.

Re: Have a personal web site

#155

Post by wccrawford »

caymanjim wrote: post #151

I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date. Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk y…

I actually feel the opposite. People do seem to be interested in the stuff I do, but the idea of creating a blog to brag about it is pretty horrifying to me.

Instead, I just send pictures of the stuff to those closest to me via SMS or other social networks, and call it a day. I don't need the whole world to know about my personal interests.

If I decide to try to make money from any of those hobbies, then I would start a blog or portfolio for that, but that'd be business, not personal.

Re: Have a personal web site

#156

Post by darekkay »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #119
stakhanov wrote: post #77

A lot of commentary around recent development on the web kind of falls into a common theme of "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do WWW like it was 1997 again?" The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content…

I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff. I think that was the core of the "old" 97 websites - I mean Google didn't exist back then, so finding a page when you search for a n…

> I think the main thing you should have in mind when you make a personal website is to not have any expectations. Nobody cares, nobody will read your words, etc - until they do, until you're suddenly discovered, and people go back through your years of posts and find a lot of gold stuff.

It depends on what your expectations/goals are. I don't have any expectations to find regular readers or to have XXX monthly users. However, I have the expectation that people will find my blog post if they're looking for a problem which I have solved. I also have the expectation that I can link to my blog post in discussions, so I don't need to repeat myself.

Re: Have a personal web site

#158

Post by [deleted] »

DonHopkins wrote: post #98
sascha_sl wrote: post #71

"how to design web sites that respect the notch on iPhone X and friends" i'm a notch disrespecter

So is Microsoft and are many people, after all of his homophobic, transphobic, and racist remarks. https://mashable.com/article/minecraft-removes-notch-referen... https://twitter.com/Nya_Flrs/status/881522593353809920/photo... https://www.gaystarnews.com/article/minecraft-notch-transpho... https://www.theroot.com/minecraft-creator-goes-full-white-pr... https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/minecraft-creator-exclu...

[deleted]

Re: Have a personal web site

#159

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE »

caymanjim wrote: post #151

I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date. Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk y…

So true. The vast majority of the web must surely be out of date, uninteresting, and not worth keeping.

Re: Have a personal web site

#160

Post by darekkay »

caymanjim wrote: post #151

I don't want a personal web site. I've had a handful of them in the past, and I've thrown together a couple shitty blogs over the years, but there are three big reasons why I don't anymore: I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date. Like everyone, I harbor fantasies about how interesting I am, and if I run into you at the pub, I'll talk y…

> I'm not that interesting; I don't have anything to show off; and inevitably it'll either become a chore or go out of date.

The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off (even though I do include my side projects etc.), but to write about specific issues I managed to solve. As a software developer, I'm googling for problems all the time. 95% of the time I land on StackOverflow or GitHub issues. But it's about those 5% that I find a blog post which really helps me. My goal was to contribute back the same way.

If you don't like to actively maintain a blog, just set up a GitHub repo + GitHub Pages (or even go for plain GitHub Gists). As long as the information can be found via a search engine, it's good enough.

Finally - don't create a blog just because you feel obliged to. It's totally fine as a developer not to have a blog.

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