121–130 of 459 posts
This blog post on my personal blog did have a wider effect: https://blog.jgc.org/2009/06/alan-turing-deserves-apology-fr...
Had no idea about this. Fascinating. Three months later: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-...
Me, being young and always up for an adventure, showed up and it was awesome. These were legit spelunker urban explorers who knew how to pick locks. We got into the caves and it was crazy. Best part is I didn't get murdered.
There's a bunch of benefits but they're mostly indirect - never like generating work or connections. Sometimes, it actually has the opposite effect - aka the HN comments can be pretty brutal. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For example, BDD (Blog Driven Development). You blog for people who don't care what you do, and you only do it because you don't care what you do. This is a public imitation of motivation for no one and nothing. Well, except that AI owners are happy, more human-written texts means more feed for the omnivorous algorithm.
Sometimes I write about things I want people know about Taiwan like their bike-sharing system[2], semiconductors[3], or simply good food in Taiwan[4].
Sometimes, I write about tech stuff, like kubernetes cpu limits[5] or blockchain consensus[6].
I thought about focusing in a single topic, but when people reaches me out, like today[7] about my food post, it reminds me that it is fine, and make me quite happy that I helped one soul out there.
[1] https://erickhun.com/posts/volleyball-and-beach-volleyball-i...
[2] https://erickhun.com/posts/taiwan-youbike-bike-sharing/
[3] https://erickhun.com/posts/world-innovation-taiwan-semicondu...
[4] https://erickhun.com/posts/taipei-restaurants/
[5] https://erickhun.com/posts/kubernetes-faster-services-no-cpu...
[6] https://erickhun.com/posts/explaining-blockchains-to-develop...
There is an extensive network of caves under my city that were used by beer breweries in the 1800's to store beer. They are all but inaccessible, and, at the time, kind of a myth. Most people didn't believe they still existed. I was fascinated by this and I compiled as much information as I could find on my personal website in the early 2000's. One day I received an email, "do you want to go into the caves? I know so…
Pretty important if you ask me
- Got me jobs. I'd estimate more than half of the significant jobs I've had in my life came about through relationships that had originated with people getting to know my work through my blog.
- Speaking engagements. I used my blog to bootstrap a bunch of these, to the point that I've spoken at well over 100 events.
- Invitations to interesting meetings. Most recently, my writing about AI has gotten me invited to some really interesting in-person meetups in the Bay Area.
- Media appearances! I've been on radio and TV a few times now thanks to things I've written on my own blog.
It's also just really rewarding to have somewhere I can post content that entirely belongs to me.
I posted this when I hit the 20 year mark with a whole bunch of highlights: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jun/12/twenty-years/
I've been running a blog at https://xeiaso.net for almost a decade now. It has been the single best decision I have ever made in my career. It allows me to skip technical screening interviews. It has made interviewing at companies _easy_ because I have _already proven_ that I understand what I'm talking about. Learning how to write well also makes it so much easier to explain things succinctly, especially when workin…
Any tips for avoiding the urge to spend time setting up a fancy SSG and playing with that and never actually writing? I've done that a few times over the years... I imagine the advice would often be "just write", which I do agree is fair advice, but wondering if you had any takes.
But really just work on writing or ideas for writing for half an hour every day. Even if you just write "I have nothing to write about today". Don't be afraid to just keep showing up.