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

i did. It is really old so the writing is very cringe... search cherokee cave tour and my username to find it.

It has helped many junior developers in teams I have run perform better, become happier and enjoy their job more. Which as a tech lead makes my job easier. I tend to write on more junior related topics ever since I ran a team of junior developers. I noticed they constantly had the same questions and feelings that I did when I was a junior. So I began writing on topics with more of a junior/entry level focus. This lead to all my team members reading them, reaching out to tell me just how much it helped to know that their struggle with x,y,z is normal. Ultimately it lead to a fantastic development team, a great supportive environment and most importantly it made them feel that their tech lead was just another developer with the same struggles at one point.

A blog has also made interviews substantially easier, which is great.

https://errolhassall.com/

Been blogging for more than a decade on my own site (https://den.dev).

1. Got my break in the tech industry thanks to a blog post on some reverse engineering tinkering I've been doing.

2. On multiple occasions, I ended up searching online for a problem only to land on a blog post I wrote years ago, so I use it as my own reference every once in a while.

3. Connected to a network of folks in the companies I've worked at (and continue to work in) thanks to blog posts where I tinker with APIs and all sorts of random stuff ("Oh yeah - I've seen that blog post before.") that I wouldn't run into otherwise.

4. Got way better at writing and expressing my thoughts clearly, especially when it comes to more technical topics, thanks to having a public forcing function.

I haven't proactively blogged in over 10 years, but when I did (mostly in the 2000-2009 range), almost everything ended up coming from it. I had a publishing company reach out to me to write a book about what I was blogging about (Ruby at the time), launched a professional blog off the back of it, had folks reach out for me to speak and/or chair their events, etc. I can connect a lot of dots back to blogging. I really should take it up again.

It got me laid.

In 1996 I was a teenager and my dad taught me html and ftp. I wrote a website with some cheesy poems and drawings, and uploaded it to geocities/athens/acropolis. Also, I put links to my page on several web directories. A girl from another city read that website and sent an email to me. It would be untoward to tell the rest of the story.