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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?

#201

Post by iamsanteri »

Among others, it helped me get a job abroad where I otherwise wouldn't have even been considered. This alone due to the lack of knowledge of the local language, and the job was in enterprise sales... I figured this out way later into the job as someone in that startup's leadership was impressed by it!

Overall, I think your blog is a portfolio of sorts.

As one of my friends told me back in the day. "If you can't write code, write instead, just write." And if you can do both (i.e. write code, as well as interesting, candid and valuable content), get your custom server-side rendered blog set up and start typing like so many others here on HN! :)

EDIT: Just like someone else mentioned here, I've also been featured on the front page of Hacker News and it heated up my Droplet VPS server quite a bit. Vanity all the way it is, haha!

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

#202

Post by ripley12 »

Just having a portfolio of projects on my website makes some job interviews a lot easier; some interviewers ditch their script and start asking questions about my portfolio projects.

I also find it rewarding to maintain and develop the website. I started out small with a generic Hugo template, and over the years I've rewritten the whole thing one small commit at a time. It's been a good learning opportunity, and it's nice to have a low-stakes project where I can do anything I want. If I want to add a silly feature I just do it.

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

#203

Post by geocrasher »

I started a blog on Google Blogger as a way to give back to the PC breakfix community. When I got back into web hosting in 2013, I saw that WordPress had taken over. So I moved it to WordPress, and then one of my posts hit Slashdot [0] and made the front page. That was a first, and was huge for me.

Then in 2015, I had some serious Hackaday envy and so I started another WordPress blog[1] to document my hobby-engineering-related stuff. That took a turn toward amateur radio. I did some fun projects, got a bit of a following.

In August 2021, I actually got to start writing for Hackaday.com, much in part due to the experience/voice that I'd created when writing for my blogs.

I also used that experience/voice to do some writing-for-hire stuff at a well known site for low-end VPSs, and that experience got me in contact with people that landed me my current job, which is the most fantastic job I've ever had.

[0] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/17/180242/surviving-th...

[1] https://miscdotgeek.com

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

#204

Post by snozolli »

Nothing tangible, like job offers. I have a couple of sites and each has a blog for my two main areas of interest: tech topics and mechanical stuff. Whenever I struggle to figure something out or compile information to make a decision, I write a blog post about it. This has proven useful several times when I needed to do something, vaguely remembered having done something similar before, and quickly find the details on my own site. Judging by a few comments, it's helped a few others over the years, too.

I also keep wikis on those sites for more interconnected information.

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

#205

Post by brightball »

It's one of those things that's hard to measure unfortunately, but I definitely think it helps.

A lot of it is what you want to be doing though. I like to talk, teach, communicate, advise and coach. Blogging let's me get that across and I think it helps there. I don't know that it would make much difference for pure coding positions though. I have gotten a few offers to do paid blogging, but I really just don't have the time. One post I wrote for Codeship years ago that got picked up here was a compilation of about a years worth of research and experience to compare Elixir and Go.

Definitely increases learning though. One of my teachers in high school told me, "If you really want to learn something, teach it." It's true. In order to publish something or give a talk on it, I go much deeper than I would have for my own uses.

Ego certainly plays a part. I'm much more motivated to keep writing when I'm getting positive feedback on it. Got picked up by HN several times and learned a lot from the conversations, which was great. Brian Krebs retweeted me once, which motivated me to write a 6 part security series* that never got the same level of traction.

Biggest issue for me is that I'm a long form, detailed writer. I know if I actually care about using this stuff for marketing then I'll need to slice the posts into bite sized chunks. Since I mostly write this stuff just to get it to stop bouncing around in my head, I stick with the long form way.

* - https://www.brightball.com/articles/the-time-i-accidentally-...

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

#207

Post by wcarss »

surprisetalk wrote: post #2

I think this essay best summarizes the benefits of starting a blog: [1] https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/ Personally, I’ve found 2 major benefits for publishing my essays: 1. Any time I encounter a problem, I write it down as an “essay idea”. Most of the time, I solve my problem without anything interesting to write about, but sometimes I have an “aha!” moment to analyze. People trick themselves into thinking they und…

> People trick themselves into thinking they understand something, until they start writing. Deep writing makes it extremely clear when you have no idea what you’re talking about.

This often actually stops me from writing. A short ways in, I realize I have no clue what's really going on. I start reading to learn more, then I either get discouraged by the complexity of it, have a crisis of confidence, or plain run out of time, and fail to ever come back to complete a post about that specific topic.

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

#208

Post by KronisLV »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #194

OK I will be the party-pooper this time. Blogging is a waste of time. You see a website with 100 blog posts. That could easily be 1000 hours of work. And then if you ask such person if he/she gained something from it the answer will be of course. The relevant question should be - was it worth the effort? Could they have gotten the same thing with less effort in some other way? When/if you are starting to blog you sho…

> In my opinion there are very few goals where "having a blog" is the right answer.

My blog has sections for articles and tutorials, even a section for documenting how broken a lot of the software out there is and I'd say that overall it's been a pleasant experience throughout the years. On one hand, it helps me jot down how to do certain things in a structured way, other times to practice expressing my views and experiences in a reasonably structured way and to just get better at writing.

I recall someone saying the following in a conference, which stuck with me (paraphrasing): "If you write something down and nobody ever reads it, those keypresses are sort of wasted."

So, I occasionally write. A lot of it is sub par but has resulted in a few job offers (which I admittedly didn't take at the time), or just nice e-mail conversations with other people. Here's a brief look at the blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/

As for personal sites, while I don't see myself having one of those super artistic portfolio sites that some lovely people out there do, I at least have a way of writing down some of the things that I've worked on over the years, my views, others' feedback and so on: https://kronis.dev/

Is it a super optimized and effective way at getting income, job interviews, clout or whatever people care about? Not really. Could someone call it a waste? Sure, but then again, a lot of the stuff we do as human beings is a bit of a waste when you think about it: watching shows or entertainment videos online, playing videos games, looking at memes, working on side projects that nobody will ever see and so on.

Sometimes it's nice to spend time on something that feels almost therapeutic in a way. Not everything needs to be perfect or optimized all the time, or even have a "right answer". The comfiness of it all actually reminds me of this article "An app can be a home-cooked meal": https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

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

#210

Post by wlesieutre »

https://will.institute

I don't really use it actively, but it helped me feel better about deleting my instagram account. I moved all the old posts over and now they still exist somewhere public but not on a social network.

Static site built with Publish, so it was some fun Swift practice outside of the apple-platforms bubble. https://github.com/JohnSundell/Publish

Other than that, not really. But I haven't tried to get anything else out of it.

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