I started my blog because I have a shitty memory, I could never remember exactly how I did things last week/month/year. Over time, it went from a crutch to a superpower. Now, I don't just remember what format to put foo.conf or what commands to empty the queue for bar.service -- I have the exact context, outcome, and all the things I tried to make it work. Between my 'long form' blog posts and my more 'wiki-like' notes site, I've basically documented everything that I know over the past decade or so.
Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
81–90 of 459 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#82I've been blogging for about 16 years. Writing is an underrated way to cement what you learn any given day or year, and over time has made it possible to reach into any part of the industry and get an actual response. Writing is particularly powerful in combination with actually doing things that (are perceived to) matter; the credibility from doing both is much higher than doing either. Concretely answering the ques…
Love your writing, Will. Have both of your books!
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#83As social networks have come and gone, it's been the hub of my online identity.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#84I always played with things and always learned stuff.
Non of them gave me a job directly though.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#85Both good and bad:
- Won a stupid writer's award at ~20yo (Opensource.com's Reader's Choice Award). Still proud of it.
- Gotten me my first internship.
- Gotten me a couple of TV interviews in my early 20s (not a lot of tech people in my country had a prominent public presence).
- Gotten me a couple of all-expenses-paid trips to like a dozen of conferences (some regional, some Europe-wide).
- Had a lot to do with me getting a Mozilla fellowship.
- Easily reached four to five digits within a day on a couple of occasions. Always followed by criticism, sometimes fair, sometimes unjustified.
- Was once threatened to be sued by a CEO of a web agency or a hosting provider (can't remember) from a neighbouring country because I kind of elevated his homophobia. It was amusing.
Best decision I could've made for myself in my early career, it really helped me stand out very quickly (in my tiny country, not guaranteed).
Since then, nothing, but that's kind of intentional. I barely publish anything. My Obsidian is full of finished posts that are never gonna see the light of day because I'd rather do anything else than deal with internet drama.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#86I created a personal website a couple of years ago: https://andlukyane.com/
1. It is a convenient place to keep and manage information about career - jobs, talks, other activities. Makes it easier to share info with recruiters.
2. Most of my blogposts are paper reviews (on ML), some are about my experience.
3. I got several interviews thanks to this blog. During some interviews people shared very positive feedback on it. The most notable example was the last interview in my current company: it was a bar raiser, the interviewer told me that he looked at my website and really liked it. It made the interview very positive and resulted in me getting this job.
4. I got a couple of small consulting gigs thanks to my website.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#87My blog over at https://nelson.cloud has helped me get new jobs. When I was interviewing for my current job, one of the interviewers mentioned that he was happy to see I was running a blog. Blogging has also helped me become a better writer and reinforce my own knowledge (which is the primary reason why I started it).
I keep my blog technical but maybe I'll write about different topics in the future. It seems like you can make new connections when being more vulnerable on your blog, just based on what I've seen from others that are more open online.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#88I'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 abou…
Any particular reason for emphasising the "own domain /control"?
One reason is that someone else's platform means you don't have full control over presentation and discoverability.
Also, at some point in their existence each platform start to decline. People move to the next platform and lose some of their readers. A few years later the same thing happens again, and readership is reduced again.
Personally I have had a lot of fun adding random bits to my website such as small tools, some explorations on creative expression with CSS and things like that.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#89I'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 abou…
> I recommend it. Start a blog - on your own domain, on webspace that you control. Following up on this - any specific reason behind this? I am considering starting a newsletter soon to first gather audience and Substack looks like right solution for this without requiring much technical setup, esp. as a non-tech. Idea is to first start blogging, get into that mindspace, build an audience and then you can move it to…
Whoever you use, Medium, Substack, Wordpress, your blog is in their hands. If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can take it all away.
You need to control your audience to reduce chances of "unforeseen circumstances"
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#90Back in the early 2000s I had a blog where I would try to post multiple times each week. While I wasn't a poor writer before, it was amazing how much I learned about overcoming writers block and being able to quickly get ideas from my head into a text file. (https://www.productivity501.com)
Later I had a blog post answering some key questions about Agile on a different site. That post didn't get much attention, but it was a good exercise in articulating part of what I'm trying to convey when coaching software engineering teams. (https://blogs.harvard.edu/markshead/what-is-agile/)
After reworking the post into a concise PDF, I sent it to a few people at a potential client. Later, after I had been awarded a contract, I found that the PDF had gotten emailed around within the organization and many people knew me as the "guy who wrote that PDF about Agile."
I then took the contents of the PDF and reworked it as a script for an animation that I posted to YouTube. That video now has 2.7 million views and has given me quite a bit of recognition in the industry...or at least recognition of the cartoon version of me. I hear he is much better looking anyway. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9QbYZh1YXY)
I think took the general ideas from the blog post, the paper, and the video and put it together in a book that I generally give away like business cards to potential clients. (https://www.amazon.com/Starting-Agile-Finding-Your-Path/dp/1...)
The practice of writing on a blog has been key to my career, even though a lot of the benefits are a bit indirect and not something people would recognize from the outside.