I see it’s common for people on HN to have a personal website/blog. I’m interested in knowing if the creation and maintenance of a personal website have lead to paid full/part time jobs, increased learning, brought new connections to others or are purely vanity.
Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
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Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#2I think this essay best summarizes the benefits of starting a blog:
[1] https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/
Personally, I’ve found 2 major benefits for publishing my essays:
1. Any time I encounter a problem, I write it down as an “essay idea”. Most of the time, I solve my problem without anything interesting to write about, but sometimes I have an “aha!” moment to analyze. People trick themselves into thinking they understand something, until they start writing. Deep writing makes it extremely clear when you have no idea what you’re talking about. And so the writing process helps me solve problems, and hopefully helps other benefits from my findings.
2. Conversations become more interesting IRL. When I go to parties, people who read my blog love hunting me down for follow-questions and ideas. And I sometimes get summoned into circles with “Oh, Taylor recently wrote an essay on this! Where is he? Call him over here!”
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#3I’ve had a lot of real consulting work (not just students wanting me to do their final year projects…) from my blog and YouTube channel.
https://atomic14.com and https://www.youtube.com/@atomic14
The other benefit has just been the fact that my side projects are actually getting finished and documented.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#4Not massive for connections (Twitter interactions are better for that) and not great for jobs directly (I've had 2 people in 8 years contact me about contract work [i.e. not even full time] that I was not advertising about based on posts).
The most use I get out of my blog in retrospect is that it has a decent amount of minimal working sample code/configuration and I reference these snippets frequently.
But writing itself is part of making sure I understand a concept. So it's not just about the retrospective view but also about what you can learn by not just hacking on stuff but also explaining it in writing.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#5My personal website I see as my legacy. When I die, it will live on for awhile, and people can get some use of my life that way.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#6Mostly I'd be pretty annoyed at myself if I didn't know how to deploy a basic website anymore. Keeps me young :|
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#7Don’t know about my blog itself, but looking at my drafts,
A) I can see how many ideas I had that fell apart the moment I started to write arguments about it
B) how horrible I am predicting stuff and just how much I’ve saved myself from being on the record with really terrible calls on the then future that is now the present :,). This too because once I started to justify my prediction I lost all confidence in it. I still think fpv drone racing could have been bigger than f1 though. Someday I’ll publish that as the hill to die on :D.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#8For work, as a software developer, pretty much all of it has come through Linkedin, it's the laziest way a recruiter will look for staff. Keep that up to date with what you can and want to do and you should be alright in that industry.
Personal websites can help, if they're looking for more of a thought leader than a pair of coding hands.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#9I've been maintaining my blog (https://brooker.co.za/blog/) for just over a decade, and I continue to do it for a couple of reasons.
- I often blog about research, which has started several very interesting conversations with academics and industry researchers, and even some very fruitful collaborations. Mostly I cover systems, database, and distributed systems work.
- I believe that the ability to write well is skill with great career and personal benefits (see https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/11/08/writing.html). Writing my blog gives me practice in a kind of writing I don't do that much in my professional life. I think it's had a considerable positive impact on my writing skill overall.
- It gives me a way to broadly share things I've been thinking about (e.g. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/04/11/simulation.html), using at work (e.g. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/02/28/retries.html or https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/01/06/erasure.html) in a way that I find personally fulfilling and enjoyable. I got into a habit for a while of sharing this kind of thing on Twitter, but eventually found that leads to shallower conversations and shorter-lived artifacts and went back to mostly using my blog for that kind of content. I find that I genuinely enjoy teaching and sharing. I also like sharing my ideas without the overhead and formality of academic publishing (which, let's face it, is a painful process).
- There are a whole lot of folks with blogs that I enjoy and admire, and want to emulate them to some extent.
I think that goes beyond vanity, but also think I have limited ability to understand my own motivations, so it may just be vanity :)
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#10I run a small blog that is based on a tiny custom script and a single markdown file. It builds static HTML files and deploys them using rsync, it takes less than one second to build and deploy. There is absolutely no technical maintenance required and I only publish things when I want to.
The main use of my blog is that I note things down that are interesting to me. List of certain things, some learnings, the results of tool evaluations, etc. I use my own blog almost daily to look up things I can't remember clearly but know exactly where I can find them again. I sometimes also share some articles with colleagues. Other than that, I could not care less whether somebody actually reads it. From the Google Webmaster Console, I do know, however, that dozens of people end up on my blog every day.
Would I start a blog again? Yes, absolutely.