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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?

#281

When I was a kid in the late 90's making a personal website was my motivation to learn programming. In my 20's it was my blog while I traveled around the world, which I used as a way to communicate with my family and friends. Now in my 30's it's helped me excel my career in web/software development as I have turned it into a side project to build a desktop environment in the browser. Feel free to check it out: https:…

I really like your website, well done.

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

#282
post #115

I have a few ML-related demos on my blog that I created in school to help me to understand some fundamental concepts. I have pointed to them during interviews and I think they helped to demonstrate a depth of knowledge that words alone could not.

Hey, I enjoyed reading your article on Alphabet Chess (https://lukesalamone.github.io/posts/alphabet-chess/). The idea seems quite unique, but I can understand how it could lead to positions where the engine may consider the position to be almost equal, but it could be objectively worse for one of the players. It would be interesting to compare this variant with Fischer Random Chess.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess#White's_a...,

> It has been argued that two games should be played from each starting position, with players alternating colors, since the advantage offered to White in some initial positions may be greater than in classical chess. However, ..... on average a Fischer Random starting position is 22.2% less unbalanced than the standard starting position.

Here's a Reddit post from October 2022 (https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/yeregq/fischer_rando...) that states the following:

> Mean centipawn advantage for white - 36.82 Standard deviation - 13.79 Most "unfair" positions with +0.79 advantage

If I am interpreting your diagram correctly, it appears that Fischer Random Chess provides more balanced positions.

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

#283
post #63

I've been blogging since 1998 and can trace every major step forward in my career to my blog. In 2003 I started writing about social networking and education - the replies to that blog post helped me kickstart my first startup. In 2009 my blog posts about technology ethics led to me giving a talk at Harvard, which led to my becoming the first employee at a media tech startup. That in turn led to me learning more abou…

Edinburgh is a pretty fantastic place to start off, FWIW

Too polite

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

#284

People with blogs, don't you feel worried that you might get something wrong in your posts, which will bite you in the behind during recruitment processes? (That, and time commitment are the primary reasons I don't blog.)

Honestly, if a potential employer turns me down based on something written in my blog, I'd say I dodged a bullet.

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

#285
post #240
post #63

I've been blogging since 1998 and can trace every major step forward in my career to my blog. In 2003 I started writing about social networking and education - the replies to that blog post helped me kickstart my first startup. In 2009 my blog posts about technology ethics led to me giving a talk at Harvard, which led to my becoming the first employee at a media tech startup. That in turn led to me learning more abou…

Way back when Joel Spolsky was a high-profile blogger in the "starting your own software business" genre, I asked him for advice about my blogging, and he replied "Stop what you're doing and get your blog onto your own domain." I had procrastinated because other platforms made everything so damn easy, and hosting my own blog meant being a part-time web admin. But I took his advice, and set up http://raganwald.com . S…

When I moved my blog to a domain I owned I added little notes to my old content saying "Previously hosted on ..." in the hope that searches for that content by URL would find the new homes.

Example: https://simonwillison.net/2004/Jan/22/defendingWebApplicatio... - at the bottom it says "Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/01/22/defendingWebAppl..."

I just tested it and it works! https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=http%3A...

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

#286
I created MeatballWiki. We ended up helping Wikipedia launch. I am responsible for the barn stars and the [[free link]] syntax.

I thought peer to peer social software was my future. I was going to speak at O’Reilly p2pcon September 23, 2001 in Washington DC. Well that didn't happen thanks to 9/11.

So unemployed after the bust I got into a masters program in Toronto to extend my ideas from MeatballWiki.

I met the love of my life and married her later. I got a job running marketing at FreshBooks and went hard into SaaS partnerships.

From there I created the Cloud Software Association and the SaaS Connect conference. Now I have my own startup AppBind to solve partnership problems.

So, not much.

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever you use, Medium, Substack, Wordpress, your blog is in their hands. If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can take it all away. You need to control your audience to reduce chances of "unforeseen circumstances"

I see your point and agree - Substack etc may exist today but might not in 2-3-5y down the line and it'd be valuable to have hold of your own writing from Day 1. On a different note, what has been the value of "creative posts" and even "creative name for your blog" for you? I am overthinking this but sometimes I find myself wondering whether my post is really all that useful, that my blog should have a more creative/…

I don't think the name or design matters very much at all.

The vast majority of traffic you get to your blog these days will be because somewhere linked to an individual post.

As long as it's readable, the people who arrive to read that post won't care about the branding that surrounds it.

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

#289

People with blogs, don't you feel worried that you might get something wrong in your posts, which will bite you in the behind during recruitment processes? (That, and time commitment are the primary reasons I don't blog.)

Would you write a blog post about it?

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

#290
My blog taught me how to write and communicate complex technical ideas to a broad audience. It’s the single most valuable thing I’ve done in my career.

There’s lots of brilliant engineers in the world. I’m pretty good, but I’ll never be the best programmer on the team. But I am exceptionally good at working with designers, artists, scientists, and hardware engineers.

Communication is the hardest problem in tech. Writing is thinking. It’s a skill that takes practice the same as any other. It’s 100% worth the investment.

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/

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