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

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

#151

Post by rootsudo »

I run several blogs.

1. Tech posts and personal experiences. I've been reached out to for custom projects and can bill pretty well. My work sells itself and the interview/introductory phone call usually is just to make sure scope makes sense and velocity/speed to complete. It is nothing unique or unusual, just routine stuff that ranks high on google SEO.

2. I post about my travel. I get people that email me and I can sometimes meetup like minded people that enjoy similar hobbies. One of a cycling blog, mostly in Asia and West Coast USA. Sure there are facebook groups for cities, but I've been pleasantly surprised at the people that found it.

3. Related to travel, just random restaurants and opinions/talk pieces. Sometimes grocery store photos and things that are for sale in A but never can be in B. Nothing interesting from this one, unfortunately except that people suggest I should just put it on instagram. Great filler for conversation if I don't want to express my Tech background.

The tech site is great, because my main email which is my name, is the websites domain, so people always take a curiosity glance. It doesn't fully weigh in on a standard job application, but it does count as passion.

I question if it's really passion, I've just enjoyed breaking stuff and fixing it, and I've documented what I do simply because why not - I wanted to really see how many hours I spend on a computer being productive.

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

#152

Post by hackitup7 »

I've seen 3 major benefits:

- It has helped me to clarify my thinking on many leadership, management, and product strategy topics

- I now have a library of reference materials that I draw from fairly regularly (at least 1-2x per month)

- I've found advisory/angel investing opportunities with strong companies from it

I highly recommend blogging if you enjoy writing

(https://staysaasy.com/)

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

#153

Post by Hakashiro »

sdfghswe wrote: post #32
xena wrote: post #12

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…

[flagged]

what

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

#155

Post by bmitc »

jjice wrote: post #38
xena wrote: post #12

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.

My recommendation would be to use either Jekyll or just go with Notion. I am allergic to setting up a bunch of stuff and just wanted to start writing. So I am using Jekyll's default Minima theme with some small adjustments, mainly to render MathJax and Mermaid diagrams in my posts. There was some initial hacking, but now I got it setup with a Docker devcontainer with VS Code, so it's as easy as pulling down the repository, and then starting to write.

I have only written one article at the moment, but I am glad I got started with it. I hope to keep adding to it over time and have a few articles in the works.

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

#156

Post by sshine »

jjice wrote: post #38
xena wrote: post #12

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.

My way around just toying with site generators and actually write was:

Start by writing to yourself. I started with writing down ideas in a private markdown system. (I’d recommend https://obsidian.md today.)

I became less self-conscious about my target audience was myself. It also became easier to make assumptions about what they (I) know, which is still a game of “will I understand this in a year or two?” For me, writing about tech to a near-future version of myself was the beginning.

Another tip: You may be in control of your documents (you maintain them, not some online system you don’t own), but if you use someone else’s blog platform, you won’t have a chance to rabbit-hole the site making. There’s something liberating about only caring about the content, not the layout.

For some subjects, it helps to write under a pseudonym, because you can experiment with what’s on your mind and not how people will treat you based on what you say. I’ve wanted to write about things like pornography and past jobs (those are unrelated, hehe), but I don’t want to upset past colleagues or seem obsessed about pornography.

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

#157

Post by iamwpj »

nixcraft wrote: post #77

I have been writing a blog since 2000 and have made many friends all around the world. I still get comments and emails about topics I post on nixCraft[0]. But, most important, I learned a lot from those comments and emails. It also helped me build social media following[1][2] just for lulz. I recommend writing a blog with your own domain and server that you control. [0] https://www.cyberciti.biz [1] https://twitter.c…

Big fan -- keep the good work up!

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

#158

Post by xena »

bmitc wrote: post #155
jjice wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My recommendation would be to use either Jekyll or just go with Notion. I am allergic to setting up a bunch of stuff and just wanted to start writing. So I am using Jekyll's default Minima theme with some small adjustments, mainly to render MathJax and Mermaid diagrams in my posts. There was some initial hacking, but now I got it setup with a Docker devcontainer with VS Code, so it's as easy as pulling down the repos…

I second this. The only reason my blog is so complicated is that I get so much traffic that I have to overengineer it. Your blog doesn't need to be as complicated. Underthink things now so you can overthink them later. A friend of mine wasn't satisfied with Hakyll and ended up making her own thing on top of Deno and Fresh: https://twilightsparkle.fly.dev/, and she's super happy with that now.

Please keep at it with writing! It's a super valuable skill that so few people actually use. It really sets you apart in the job market and is so underrated from a professional standpoint.

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

#159

Post by weavie »

bookofjoe wrote: post #50
travisjungroth wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you not blown up with spam comments?

Even when I had 25,000 page views daily, I'd only get a couple spam comments/day, easily deleted, no big deal. Now I get about one every 1-2 months.

I guess times have changed. About 10 years ago I was getting hundreds per day.

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

#160

Post by mattgreenrocks »

xena wrote: post #130
jjice wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every time I get anxiety, I write one blogpost. I get a lot of anxiety. 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.

Love this advice. Thank you for your blog.
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