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

So I have a few different experiences:

1. I used to write technical pieces on Medium aimed mostly at people starting out their careers. I suddenly blew up and made reasonable money from it for a little while and that blog (before and after blowing up) was a big factor in me landing both consultancy jobs and a full-time job.

2. I now write almost exclusively on my personal website (https://yakkomajuri.com). I get no money out of it and few people read what I write, with the exception of some posts getting on the front page here once in a while.

It's fantastic: I've kept up with my love of writing and have allowed myself to just write about anything, including pieces that show a lot of vulnerability. This culminated in me publishing some poems a couple weeks ago (in Portuguese though).

Beyond that, my website is super bespoke, using a static site generator I built, and it's vanilla HTML/JS/CSS. It's refreshing to write dumb code with almost no deps. I also learn a lot through building it and writing on it, and have expanded it to include different areas of interest (pictures for example). Overall, it just _feels good_ to have it.

Ah, I've also started to write goals publicly which has been a nice experience too.

I've been blogging since 1998 and can trace every major step forward in my career to my blog.

In 2003 I started writing about social networking and education - the replies to that blog post helped me kickstart my first startup.

In 2009 my blog posts about technology ethics led to me giving a talk at Harvard, which led to my becoming the first employee at a media tech startup.

That in turn led to me learning more about media tech accelerators. I applied to one with a new startup idea, and got in, in part because my blogging on the open web was picked up by the New York Times as part of a story.

Blogging for that startup helped us find customers and a like-minded community.

When that startup was acquired, blogging both externally and internally at the acquirer helped me make friends and share ideas that wouldn't have reached the right people otherwise.

And so on. Sharing ideas - not just tips, but thoughts about the why and who behind technology, as well as being vulnerable in public - has let me cut through from being a nobody in Edinburgh to someone with a pretty great technology career in SF.

And even if none of that had happened, writing is a wonderful way to structure your thoughts, consider what really matters, and reflect.

I recommend it. Start a blog - on your own domain, on webspace that you control.

I have a personal blog, a .com with my name since 2001. Soon after, got a .com with my family name and made it into a company. And here are a few events I remember off the top of my head - that shaped my life;

- Got my first big speaking engagement in USA (I’m in India).

- Got my small service company acquired-hired and got introduced to the world of Startups.

- Bought a car, paid rent, and bootstrapped a few Startups.

- Got a Girlfriend. A girl emailed that it is impossible for the live visiter on my counter to be speeding so fast (she suspected I might be cheating with a script that just increase the counter). I got a date to proof that my website was indeed that popular. Once upon a time, my website was pretty well visited. If I remember correctly, it did slipped in within 100 top Alexa Ranking (I’m fuzzy on this but it was hot).

- Bought down a scammy/spammy company with a single blog post. But felt really bad within 5-6 months, and wiped out the whole content and apologized to the business owner. He did what he did but I should not have done that, which killed a business.

- Helped a lot of businesses/startups launch by writing about them and felt really happy.

- I know, at-least, one big tech company quoted my article as one of the sources for their patent.

- Quite a few people have emailed me saying that my website shaped their career and I feel really happy about them. In-fact, there was a parent that emailed me as their son got the inspiration from my website to pursue a tech career. He was very happy when I called up and talked to him.

- Of course, if not directly, my website played a vital role in a lot of interesting freelance/contract work that came - Disney, STARZ, Pearson, Cambridge, etc. Well, I got an almost-free entry to Disney World, Los Angeles for about two years around 2005-2007. ;-)

- One rainy evening, I was with friends at HackerDojo in Mountain View. A guy behind came up and asked, “You are brajeshwar.com, right?”

- Also, I have gotten a lot of legal takedowns, threats, copied/stolen without permission and what not!

For me, the biggest benefit has been improving my thought process. I generally think better when I write. For example, this helps keep me on track. What hypothesis am I testing? What, in general, am I even doing? I find it just too easy to stray off course, or get confused, when flying free without a narrative to keep myself grounded.

I wrote about my experience with this here: https://thelinell.com/The-Notion-Experiment-8191f33eaa864469...

The main idea for me was to just reduce the barrier to entry so that writing more was too easy to avoid. I already use Notion for taking notes throughout the day, so transitioning to also jotting down blog thoughts has been very easy and has increased the amount of writing that I do.