Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

First of all, it's a nice hobby. No bullshit programming, no frameworks, no dependencies, no annoying editors. I just write my code and text and enjoy doing so.

Second, it gives powerful motivation to study. I'm now writing a new page on rational interpolation and just yesterday I accidentally found a very simple way to avoid the Runge effect. I was just playing with interactives and it came out of the blue. There is no way I would have learned it otherwise.

Third, it helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning. They came to me and proposed to propose them a book on geometry. And so I did. The book is called Geometry for Programmers and it's coming this summer.

Fourth, I do public lectures (or at least I used to before the war), and the audience loves interactive illustrations. So I usually turn my site pages into presentation-like pages and do lectures with them.

So for me, having a website pays off in multiple ways.

Concretely answering the questions asked:

1. At various points I spent a lot of time maintaining, but now it's just a static blog deployed via Github Actions onto a Github Page. I haven't done any meaningful changes in a few years, and the changes are for fun, not necessity

2. I got my first job in tech thanks to blogging: https://lethain.com/datahub/

3. My blogging has made it possible to write two pretty successful books: https://staffeng.com/book/ and https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle (working on a third now)

4. Hard to assess, but I believe I've been able to subtly but meaningfully advance the technology industry through my writing :-)

5. A significant majority of folks are unaware that I write, and that's great! I don't think impact depends on folks connecting their colleague to the writer or whatnot

My read of this was that it might've meant to frame the possibilities: "Exhaustively, is it for career development, or is it a moral failing?"

Additionally, "vanity" seems a bit loaded, shifting the perceived tone to possibly annoyed suspicious/accusatory, like maybe the writer suspects the answer to the implied either/or might be the latter category.

This read could be off, or maybe the writing hints at the writer's self-critical reflection on whether they should have a personal blog: when their only conscious goal would be career development, and they'd consider any other reason in themselves to be vanity, which they'd want to avoid?

Since then, unfortunately, I have mostly let it stagnate. I use my site primarily as a mechanism to centerpoint other things I do online now, like photography, however I don’t create as much as I used to.

I am hopeful I will have time to write more in the future, but in some respects the topics I want to write about I have preferred to keep private, because if someone disagrees with you in the age of social media you face life-altering repercussions rather than an interesting dialogue. I still write at least monthly, but do so in a private journal by hand with pen and paper.

I mostly write because I believe writing is thinking, and because I tend to have fleeting thoughts I want to capture and if I don’t write them down they’ll simply disappear. When I first got into writing online, doing so always created interesting conversations. Now, that is much rarer, so that is likely another reason I publish less of what I write.