Have a personal web site • Hacker News Board

Re: Have a personal web site

#241

Post by intertextuality » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

maddening wrote: post #219

intertextuality wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Before I go to a mechanic I am checking their review online. Before I hire an artist that would make some graphics for me I would ask for a portfolio. Nobody in graphic industry is surprised when someone asks to show some of their works. Same with IT, you would try to do some background checking. See if there was some recommendations from person's past employers or some sort of porfolio. Should it be everything I wou…

You don't quite get what I was saying.

A review is not written by the mechanic themself once they get home from work, is it? My point was that people don't expect mechanics to go home and start blogging about new tools that they use or the latest in car news. It's an absurd concept, yet it's seen as normal for criticizing and penalizing prospective software developers. Artists are in a totally different boat, where they actually do need a good portfolio to demonstrate their personal style and past work, etc. For programmers they do it through known concepts called "resumes" and "interviews".

> But if I can see someone's actual achievements it gives me much more insight and confidence about how I am evaluating the candidate

If I have an accomplishment but I don't blog about it or post on github, did it actually happen?

Not only is this quite preposterous, I literally cannot share code if it was developed under an NDA. I only can discuss vaguely / without specifics in interviews.

> Would I miss some good candidates? Probably. But the strategy is not about not missing all good candidates, it is about ruling the bad ones.

Again, you are arbitrarily penalizing people for not being on their computer 14-15 hours a day. You are penalizing people with children. You are penalizing people like me who have interests outside of programming.

Not only is your reasoning absolutely absurd, you are -still- missing out on good candidates. It's lazy, and I would not want to work at a place that hires like this, because it means they do not value personal lives outside of work at all.

People like you are why people feel like they HAVE to blog and HAVE to contribute to open source projects- on their personal time. Fuck that. It's a sickening practice and as I said, it's not expected in other fields. Why is programming the exception here?

Re: Have a personal web site

#242

Post by FerretFred » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #216

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 don't think writing is just about communicating things to other people. It's also communicating things to yourself. I think the greatest value in writing things down is to order and articulate your own thoughts. Certainly in my own case, I never finish a large chunk of articles I start to write simply because during the research I find out I was wrong, or that things are more complex than I thought and I'm no longe…

> It's also communicating things to yourself.

Yeah! And remember to back it up. I had a blog in the early days when it was all new, and bitterly regret not backing it up properly - 5 years of content gone.

Re: Have a personal web site

#243

Post by jartelt » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

leftyted wrote: post #233

darekkay wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> The main goal of my blog was not to be interesting or show off That's what they all say. Humans are social creatures and the main motivator for anyone to do anything in public is to "show off" or "be interesting". "All is vanity". That isn't necessarily a bad thing. Without a desire to compete, impress, prove our worth and so on we'd be living in huts. But it's something to be aware of and something that should be…

I think your view is too cynical. People also can be motivated by altruism or by wanting to pay it forward. I've answered plenty of questions on facebook/reddit/etc. and do so because people have answered my questions in the past.

The part you are correct about is that it is easy to then get wrapped up in how many visitors your blog gets or how many upvotes your answer gets. Those vanity metrics definitely pull on the vanity strings. But, some people definitely do not care about "showing-off" when they put something up online.

Re: Have a personal web site

#244

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

Veen wrote: post #209

jeremyjh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your website is indexed by Google. You can see whether it's indexed by running a site specific search. Put "site:" before the domain name. But that site has three pages, one of which is a blog listing with no content. It's not ranked because there's nothing worth ranking.

[deleted]

Re: Have a personal web site

#245

Post by telaport » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

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 may not know who you are, but after reading this post I know that I would definitely never want to hire you. So there's that.

Re: Have a personal web site

#246

Post by theNJR » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:09 PM UTC

I’ve been writing on my personal site [0] since 2006. Most of it is bad. The early goal was to rank first for my name on google. That worked until an actor with my same name emerged.

A few of my articles have made it to the front page here on HN. The traffic spike and follow on views from peoples newsletters and twitter is fun to see.

But nothing material has ever come from it.

I still enjoy writing on my site. When I’m in a mood where I write twice a week some of it even gets good. Then there will be periods of months where I stop. I tell myself if there was a consistent audience coming back for more I would write more. But that is undeniably the wrong answer to the personal site chicken-egg problem.

I suppose this thread is now pushing our personal sites.

[0]https://www.nicholasjrobinson.com

Re: Have a personal web site

#247

Post by H1Supreme » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

stakhanov wrote: post #107

raffomania wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like a big audience is the only thing that matters. The linked post talks about a personal website as a digital identity. Giving people a link so they can find you online is a good reason to have a website, even today. Besides that, making your own website is rewarding in many other ways - Being creative, getting thoughts out of your head, pinning down certain arguments you tend to repeat, etc.

The first aspect you mention (handing out a link so people can look it up) is like an online business card that's "free form" in nature. That makes sense if you are a creative professional and the website is a showcase of your creative ability. But otherwise: If you apply for an job, say in finance, you'll be asked for a resume, because people can't be bothered dealing with information that's extraneous to what goes…

> If you apply for a job as a coder, you'll be asked for a link to a github repo, because people can't be bothered with looking at anything other than your code.

In my experience, this is not true. I setup a website to describe software projects, and my role in them. It was, per my current boss, a key factor in getting an interview. Browsing github repo's, imo, is much more bothersome than reading a well crafted project page.

Re: Have a personal web site

#248

Post by _pmf_ » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

I think GitHub profile maintenance as a service would be quite a business model for body leasing type of consultancies (that cater a particular industry sector) ... for individuals, it would not be very sustainable.

Actually, a lot of work maintained by consultancies is half finished non production shovelware, so they probably already do this themselves.

Re: Have a personal web site

#249

Post by teddyh » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:10 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #91

I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and have a few thoughts based on that... Hosting chronology something like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo facility, back to earlier shared hoster. For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`. (The longer story behind thi…

> For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`.

Why not use .us (if you are in the USA, that is)?

Re: Have a personal web site

#250

Post by ArtWomb » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 1:11 PM UTC

Terrific thread! Am enjoying reading about personal experiences around "building your brand." In fact, I believe this is so important you should fight your instinct to keep things "pure." And go ahead and contract professional services if you are serious. Hire professional developers, writers, graphics, video, and stylists if necessary ;)

For certain folks just coming up this is de rigeur. If you are a young writer / director trying to break into advertising to gain experience before conquering Hollywood. You need a killer demo reel. Same for a recent MFA grad living in Brooklyn seeking Manhattan gallery representation. An Instagram that tells a visual narrative is way more powerful than a series of unconnected shots.

Furthermore, learning to take a single piece of content. Such as an onstage presentation or demo. And slice and dice it into bite sized content tailored to specific platforms. It is one method for extending your reach 10x. It's the "attention arbitrage" in Gary Vee's Content Model ;)

https://www.slideshare.net/vaynerchuk/the-garyvee-content-mo...

And it's why "free tiers" such as Github Pages, App Engine and 1MB are so important in our community. Not only does it level the playing field. It offsets the risks for experimentation and self-discovery.

"Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself" --Miles Davis