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Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

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Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#61

Post by tathagatadg »

I have been searching for the same answer myself. Blogs, or long form narrative consumption have morphed into newsletters and substack is the king there solving the problem for both consumer and publisher.

Note Scott Hanselman, Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, Cal Newport, Derek Sievers, Tim Ferris etc. - a lot of the OGs still maintain their own real estate on the internet. These are outside the walled garden pruned by algorithms of megalomaniacs. Whatever format you are producing content, there is an essay at the core of it. Personal blog could serve as an archive for that.

Recently Oxide and friends did an episode to address this topic - I'd highly recommend that episode and the podcast itself. This was in context of the book launch https://www.manning.com/books/writing-for-developers. I've just made through a few chapters of the book, it will give you a lot of good reasons and framework on how you should do it.

If your aim is building a readership, consider the following questions: - Why do you want to grow an audience? - What do you have to offer to that audience so that they'll come back? - Is long format prose their preferred medium for consuming the message?

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#62

Post by codegeek »

Yes. I don't write for others though. I write because:

- It helps me gather my thoughts together and reflect on where I am.

- It helps me get better at writing and communicating.

- It helps me stay accountable for a few things. I like to write about success, failures, lessons learned etc and sometimes those things keep me accountable.

- It helps me learn better. Let's say you are writing about a technical topic. Now you will have to go and learn/relearn a few things related to it as you write about it.

If you write because you want to be found through SEO, that is hard in 2024 because Google search is now a shitfest with crappy ads first and real organic stuff doesn't even show until 6-7 entries.

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#64

Post by sethhochberg »

andrewaylett wrote: post #31

If it's ever been worth it, it's still worth it. Because: no, I don't remember when maintaining a blog was the way to build your developer brand, nor that thoughtful technical writing alone would get you anything -- if no-one reads what you write, the result is the same as it's always been.

I do think there was a distinct period 10-15 years ago where, particularly when trying to break into the startup scene as a rookie developer coming from a non-CS education background, the blog was a useful place to write about technology just to show you were actually connected to "the scene" somehow even though you had limited professional experience. Somewhere out there I still have a neglected personal blog with posts from those days where I was hacking open source firmware onto a WiMAX receiver so I could use it as a router, sharing source for some audio processing effects plugins I wrote in college courses, things like that... cool stuff for a college kid, but not what I spend time doing now years into my career. At this point my credibility is from my professional work.

Of course, that's exactly why it eventually became standard for every aspiring rookie developer to have a blog; and eventually these just turned into straight-up programming TIL blogs as more and more people who weren't ever tech hobbyists entered the field. The signal quality diminished, and in the modern world of ML-assisted ATS resume screening it may not even be a signal at all.

Basically, "building a brand" as a certain kind of technologist had value when relatively few people were doing it. Now I think its very fair to question as a tool for getting hired.

Anybody who writes because they like writing should certainly continue to do so!

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#67

Post by scarface_74 »

paulpauper wrote: post #59
scarface_74 wrote: post #14

I would go even further. Trying to develop a “brand” that stands above the noise isn’t worth it. That’s not saying writing isn’t important. I don’t think I understand a subject unless I can teach it, explain it and argue both sides about why you should and shouldn’t use it. If I were going to go into independent consulting as oppose to working for consulting companies, I might start a blog a year ahead of time. But i…

There are thousands of blogs. You need something memorable to keep people coming back. That is what branding is to some extent. It's not just about slogans or logos.

Even if you do have something memorable, how would you be found through organic search and even then why would most people remember to check it off unless they follow you on social media - which will probably be suppressed if you have a link to your blog - or they use RSS, which few people do these days unfortunately.

You almost have to have a mailing list, which is problematic on its own.

Then, what’s the ultimate goal? Ads (ughh)? Paid subscriptions? Becoming known as an industry expert?

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#68

Post by wannabebarista »

I write a blog to share projects and to have a single place to point people to (that can be accessed without an account).

I share some of my posts on HN such as annual interesting books [0] and articles [1] lists. But my main source of new readers recently has been from chatbots. This has led to the interesting scenario where many posts more than six months old get regular traffic, while traffic on new posts depends on a link getting shared somewhere. I'm guessing it's due to how often my website is getting scraped for training data.

As for motivation, I still get a rush from receiving an email that someone enjoyed a book I recommended or some code I wrote helped them solve a problem.

[0] https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-books-2024

[1] https://bcmullins.github.io/interesting-articles-2024

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#69

Post by didgetmaster »

I have a personal project (a new kind of data management system) that is directly a product of my interests (storage devices, file systems, databases, parallel processing, distributed systems, etc.) and also a blog.

While I love it when someone reads one or more of my blog posts and learns something useful; that is just one of the reasons why I write them. They help me organize my thoughts. They are a 'paper trail' of why my architecture was designed they way it was. They help me understand why I decided to include a particular feature. They help me figure out where my roadmap is taking me.

The software is available for free download, so the blog of course encourages the readers to try it out for themselves; but it is not designed to necessarily 'build a brand' or 'drive sales'.

I tell people about my blog, but I do little to promote it (beyond mentioning it in forums like this one). I don't measure its success on how many people read it.

Re: Ask HN: Is maintaining a personal blog still worth it?

#70

Post by nchagnet »

I agree with the general feeling from other commenters that a blog should first and foremost be an activity you do for yourself. It's a great way to organize your thoughts and truly reflect on them.

I have been trying to start my own recently (https://nchagnet.pages.dev/blog), mostly because I used to write research articles and I miss that feeling at the end of a project to wrap it up with some piece of writing you are proud of. I am still looking for my voice, but it has definitely been fun!

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