It hasn't done anything for me. Yet.
It has made me known on Hacker News, which I think will pay off eventually.
It is weird to be known as the "Zig function colors guy" though.
Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
221–230 of 459 posts
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#222I'm fairly certain that writing about JavaScript on my personal blog ( https://adequatelygood.com ) led directly to landing a lucrative job at Twitter in 2010 which was foundational to my career. I had just a few months of experience in JavaScript (or programming in any serious professional capacity) but writing about it made me taken seriously and was a major accelerant to my career. Not sure of whether that experie…
Early in my career I referenced your article on the js module pattern constantly, and referred it to several team members. I still use it to this day on some occasions. Cheers!
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#223Almost every job (fulltime and contract) that I've had was due to someone reading an article on my site and then asking me if i'd like a job.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#224Landed a co-founder position after writing about something topic relative, after an intro from someone in my network. Was contacted by a big tech recruiter on linkedin after seeing my blog and ended up with a great job.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#225There 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…
As soon as I read this, I knew it was St. Louis. A former co-worker used to have a shop on Cherokee Street about 15 years ago. He told me that a neighboring building had access to the caves through the basement, though its owner was too afraid to explore it.
Could that have been across from what is now Earthbound Beer? If so, they hand-dug all the debris out of the cave and you can pretty easily get a tour. The owner said the cave under the cave is off limits b/c they almost ran out of air while exploring it.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I recommend it. Start a blog - on your own domain, on webspace that you control. Following up on this - any specific reason behind this? I am considering starting a newsletter soon to first gather audience and Substack looks like right solution for this without requiring much technical setup, esp. as a non-tech. Idea is to first start blogging, get into that mindspace, build an audience and then you can move it to…
I think the best strategy is to do both. Publish on your own site so you have control and aren't fully dependent on someone else's service, and then also post to Substack and wherever else your audience is. https://indieweb.org/POSSE
I don't think Medium has a lot of cachet at this point but I used to publish on my own blog and cross-post anything I thought have broader interest to Medium. Lately, I'm mostly on content marketing sites which have promotion machinery. I think this year I will start posting more on my personal Blogger site and do professional stuff on a new hosted Wordpress site.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#227I've been blogging about programming since 2011. I can't say that it has had any direct career impact, although it hasn't hurt either.
I have kept writing because it helps me clarify my thoughts. I've also reviewed books and courses, and writing those reviews makes me learn the content much better.
There are other reasons too that I have written about in this post:
https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#228I have had small benefits from my blogs:
1) I ran a blog in the 00s about decommissioning old Lotus Notes environments and mapping out tech details of how to migrate from that platform to Microsoft tools. I got a few consulting gigs from that.
2) I put up some tools to design craft projects (knitting, beading, etc.) Got a little bit of monthly revenue, ended up selling the projects for a few thousand dollars.
So nothing life-changing, but I definitely paid for maybe a half year of my life from those gigs.
That being said, "purely vanity" is still more accurate. I didn't put any of that up with revenue as a goal. I wrote and coded for my own knowledge, and all benefits were purely accidental.
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#229Honestly? Next to nothing, but it's nice to know that I have a space for me, managed by me where I can write in my preferred format and follow my own limits, it's really nice
Re: Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glad you enjoyed it! And, no, i never did verify the firefighter story.
So, I looked into the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's archive (1874 to present) in the hope of solving this mystery, but could not find anything. However, I did find a rather fascinating article titled "A Morning in the Cave" that was published on 28 July 1996. If anyone is affiliated with an academic institution, they can read it on ProQuest. There is a free OCR version available here: Page 7: https://www.newspapers.com/n…
what? this is amazing, I haven't seen that article. I was just able to pull the article's text up for free via the St. Louis County Library. Thank you! if I figure out how to find individual pages, i will let you know.