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

I've been profiling local and independent coffee shops in the metro Atlanta area on the website and blog for about five years. This project has allowed me to build relationships with coffee shop owners, baristas, and coffee enthusiasts in the city. It's been rewarding to be able to engage with this passionate community (via the newsletter/blog) but also via in-person events such as a coffee crawl I recently organized and led.

Although the topic of coffee / coffee shops is niche, writing about the places I visit, I am able to touch upon my diverse set of interests (art, photography, technology, design, reading, writing, general curation, psychology, philosophy, history, etc.)

It actually got me my current job. An investor found my blog on Go microservices, and was looking for someone with some experience around that to help get his product/platform off the ground. I worked on it part-time for a couple of years, then when I got made redundant late last year, I got the chance to work on it full-time. And I absolutely love it.

Asides from that, it improved my written communication skills, my ability to constrain ideas and concepts down to the bare minimum. I took it down recently as the content was old and the website needed updating, and I got requests from folks in India, China and Russia requesting me to put it back up again because they use it as a reference. I even found out it had been translated into Mandarin, and was shared a lot around Chinese tech blogs. It blew my mind. It wasn't some huge effort to make really, but it had a big impact on lots of people trying to learn Go and microservices. I wish I had time to revamp it and do some more, but sadly not these days!

I'm a US academic, so there's not much choice but to have a website. It has definitely led to increased learning and new connections. Hard to say for sure, but I suspect it has opened some side opportunities.

I'd have a website even if it provided none of the above. Think about how good it feels to have a deep conversation with someone on a topic you love. That's what it feels like to write for my website. And in 2023, the cost is basically zero.

I have seen the benefits of: - Having some kind of concrete output to learning or little micro projects. Organizing and adding to my notes is kind of fun. - Documentation for my future self. Sometimes I do go back to refresh. - Some people have reached out for collaboration solely because of my blog - Not having to fixate on ideas anymore because I got them out there. - I don't know for sure, but I think it has helped my case getting hired, especially since my pedigree is a bit off for the job I'm doing.

I think controlling your content is really important. I want it to still exist in 20 years. Getting off of wordpress was annoying and scary. I'm a fan of simple.

https://www.philipzucker.com/

I've been writing online since 2008. The tangible benefits have been:

- I wrote a simple HTML template for a friend that mimicked the style of a popular website. I wrote about it and put it up for download. Someone asked if there was a WordPress theme for it so I made one. I ended up making low/mid 6 figures overall, including sales for several years and selling the business.

- When I was doing freelance development, I got a few clients from my contact form. Not nearly as much as I hoped and usually smaller projects, but it was something. Every new client leads to introductions to other clients, which was the main pipeline for business for me.

- Everything technical I've written about has helped me level up in that topic to make sure I'm not leading someone astray or sound like an idiot!

- When my site was WordPress, I got a number of very kind, personal comments on some of my less technical posts. Not tons, like 3-4 that I can remember fondly. It's such a wonderful feeling to have this momentary, text-based connection with someone you know nothing about. Brought back BBS days a bit.

- I got one really nasty comment that I still remember. Really brought me down a while but I used it to move past some of my own feelings about my work. Turned out to be a silver lining!

Intangible:

- Writing regularly has been both a great outlet for me, as well as an important secondary skill at work. I'm always known as "the writer" on the team, and I think that's helped me advance in a lot of ways.

- With 1K+ page views a month on a variety of topics, I can't help but to think that I'm helping some people with some things. That makes me feel good enough to keep doing it.

- My work writing is intensionally concise and dry (in most cases), my journaling is free-form, and my fiction is nascent. But blogging publicly feels like the place where it all comes together. I try to make it fun and casual while also accurate and concise. It feels like the most challenging writing that I do.