41–50 of 373 posts
Once it's written down, I might as well put it online, and it has the added advantages that I can simply link to the material rather than having to explain it over and over again e.g. in emails.
> Future you. Your posts become a time capsule of your evolving mind.
Fully agree with that one. My own blog has become a public diary of my hobby and it's great to see what I've been up to and how wrong I was about certain predictions and assumptions, especially about the ones that say that I'm done reworking my home server setup, multiple times.
I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it. But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).
Publish a blog so an LLM can use it and make money for someone already wealthy.
Obviously facetious, but I'd hope most people would want their blog post read by LLMs. I suspect (hope) a lot of blog posts are written to share knowledge. In that regard having that knowledge trained in to LLMs (ideally open ones, but even closed ones) could further that goal.
In fact, my web server logs show that out of the 170 or so pages on my website, only about 7% receive regular traffic from visitors. The remaining 93% have got only myself as the reader.
I've been web logging the last 25 years and I'll probably continue to do it for as long as I can. In fact, 25 years ago, it was just a website hosting a loose collection of pages. It took its current shape and form only around 2006 when blogging became fashionable!
Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past. Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it. Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who yo…
Agreed, after a year or two, blogs become your experience logs to prove experience and credibility once the landscape is killed by GenAI slops and SEO scams. Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.
I always read blogs if people include them in resumes.
It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume.
More commonly, blog content was ambiguous about the applicant’s skills. For example, when someone applies to an embedded job but has a blog of beginner level Arduino projects, is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?
I also think people greatly overestimate the idea that someone will LLM their way into a great blog, and they greatly underestimate the difficulty of forging timestamps. Even git timestamps are easy to fake. Your interviewers aren’t going to scrutinize the Wayback machine for evidence, but not being indexed isn’t proof that it wasn’t there anyway.
Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past. Credibility is a very valuable commodity. It's worth investing in ways to build more of it. Don't assume people will stumble across your content (though they will eventually via Google). Actively send links to people who yo…
Using that as a first pass has led to more time engaging with thoughtful people about well considered ideas, and less time listening to the noise that shows up when you solicit opinions.
There's a point to writing, but is there a point to publishing your diary on the internet? You could just keep it under your pillow, or on your own computer. I blog so that other people read my writing, and fortunately they do, at least sometimes. I don't think I'd continue if there was no public interest.
I disagree. I write differently when I anticipate an audience (even if they never come). Maybe parallel: I notice when, for example, I edit videos in my own world I have a very different take on the edit when I am showing it to someone for the first time. Thinking to myself: "Now as I watch someone else watching it, I am become aware that this scene goes on a bit too long. This cut is a little abrupt, disorienting."…
Is that good, though? If the product is purely for self-consumption, is the audience-anticipating version necessarily the better version?
And at what point, after how many unread blog posts, do you rationally stop anticipating an audience?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. I write differently when I anticipate an audience (even if they never come). Maybe parallel: I notice when, for example, I edit videos in my own world I have a very different take on the edit when I am showing it to someone for the first time. Thinking to myself: "Now as I watch someone else watching it, I am become aware that this scene goes on a bit too long. This cut is a little abrupt, disorienting."…
> I write differently when I anticipate an audience (even if they never come). Is that good, though? If the product is purely for self-consumption, is the audience-anticipating version necessarily the better version? And at what point, after how many unread blog posts, do you rationally stop anticipating an audience?
That said though, "publishing" keeps me honest. (In the same way I find using my actual name on the internet "keeps me honest". I'm disinclined to shit-post.)
I am more inclined to, if not fact-check all points I make, just drop indefensible things I might have said altogether. (And sometimes I learn just why a thought of mine is indefensible, ha ha.)
This is especially useful because link-rot means that resources I was able to uncover might not be available in the future. A few years ago I did a massive amount of research into internals of old unixes for data recovery and maintenance of said systems in the modern era(machines attached to million dollar pieces of testing equipment go away when the machine does). I was maintaining and upgrading(mostly scsi2sd) and backing up systems that all predated y2k. Most of my research references are now dead links to nowhere. I now print to pdf as well as take archive.is links of all my referenced sources.
I'm generally terrible about blogging, but I'm changing that for 2025. I'm now in a position where I'm solutions architecting a lot of things as my primary day job. This makes easy blog post subjects that not only clarify my thoughts and understanding, but end up being the basis for the internal documentation on the subject.
A lot of what I now do is in terraform, cloudformation, golang, or Python. I make sure when I publish my blog post, I include a complete working example. For all my terraform, all one has to do is clone and run terraform apply, after satisfying the barebones prerequisites.