131–140 of 459 posts
I joined them shortly after and a year later I sold Readlang to them. In 2021 Duolingo IPO'd and I'm now financially independent, which may not have happened if not for writing about it on my personal blog.
(Oh, and I really ought to write another blog post about buying Readlang back from Duolingo last month!)
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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.
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.
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.
(Maybe the trick is: if you must tinker, also turn that tinkering into writing?)
The benefit for me is that I have it when I need it. Oh, and a nice ego bust when I write a new blog post and see ~100 to 200 daily visits for a few days before the external traffic dies out.
It's fun to share it, but it didn't have any actionable impact on my career. Some employers tend to highlight it as a strong asset during the recruitment process. My posts didn't gain any major traction, outside of a single post that's bringing me Google traffic.
With that being said, I don't regret running it at all! Posts will accumulate over the years, and I'm slowly getting better at writing :)
If you're curious, I enjoy creating things and bike adventures: https://kaszkowiak.org/en/blog
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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.
I'm not sure Xe is the right person to ask about avoiding playing with the site's backend: https://xeiaso.net/blog/series/site-update ;-) (Maybe the trick is: if you must tinker, also turn that tinkering into writing?)
Most of my site update posts are just my notes from tinkering with things turned into prose.
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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.
The blog is great, I love the layout with the tags, is it static? If it's open source I'd like to see how it's done
My interests are esoteric. I blogged up my process of learning a semi famous microcontroller RTOS, a FOSS virtualization infrastructure that peaked in the 10s that seems to be in the process of becoming rapidly forgotten, and a complete K8S / virtualization / HCI infrastructure system of many parts from a euro-ish company that seems mostly ignored in the USA (weird to me, its pretty awesome and the docs are all English!)
I've also used blogs to write book reviews along the idea that I "will" finish the book and read the entire thing and learn it fully if I'm blogging up a detailed review of every chapter.
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I grew up and lived in México most of my life.
Back in 2014 I was a consultant working in Accenture México. One weekend I wrote a UX analysis of the "Settings" screen in mobile platforms, and I posted it on my personal site. (Long lost, but reposted [here](https://72mena.com/the-ux-of-mobile-settings/)).
I don't know how it happened, but after a few weeks of no traction, it suddenly got a ton of traffic and my site went down.
One year later I was interviewing for a contractor role that required relocation to the US. My last interviewer (and decision maker) mentioned to me something along these lines: "hey, I saw your name and it reminded me about your "UX of Mobile Settings" article, I remember reading it and I liked a lot the analysis you did."
I suspect this article (with all its flaws and broken English) had a big impact on me getting the UX position I was applying for, which made me relocate to the US.
> 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. 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 possib…