ok then, lets turn this around: every blogger should code!
Engineers Should Blog
31–40 of 130 posts
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#32Blogging is waste of time. Most of blogs are paid PR/Marketing/SEO content that is low quality click-bait. Like this blog post that is PR piece for company that author works.
Engineer should sharpen theirs skills on github. During interview github profile is much larger hiring factor than blog.
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#33When I read ,,the only thing you need is an editor'', I thought how cool it would be if what I write would be reviewed by some people before going public...it would make me less shy about it. Then I realized he means a text editor (though he's an editor himself)
I used to have my silly micro-blog posts reviewed by a respected peer, but it kind of defeated the purpose of cracking me out of my shell. Sometimes diving into the deep end works for the better.
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#34No, every engineer should not blog. It is hard enough to find the right information when you have to shift through clickbait and the signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. If I was interested in assessing someone's caliber, I'd rather look at their Github than their blog. Anyone can write a blog post, not everyone can write good code. Blog if you have some insight into technology that hasn't been already elucidated or if…
Tim didn't say it's useful for other engineers. He said it's useful 1) to get non-technical people can hear about your skills (the ones who couldn't tell good code from bad code) and 2) for yourself, since writing forces clear thinking.
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#35I think there is some truth to this. I landed my first startup engineering position via a blog post. This particular post only took 30 minutes to write - they can be short and sweet.
This is awesome! Did you expect the post to get you a job? Do you have a link to it?
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#36What do people view as good blogging platforms for this stuff these days? Jekyll on Github? Something else? I'd like to get going fast focusing on content, but of course want good syntax highlighting, comments, and such features.
I've seen some people start with just a github repo full of markdown files, and issues for comment threads. Can work for programming blogs, and you can easily turn the markdown files into blogposts in another system later.
(downside is that you can't as easily tie it to a personal domain name)
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#37I maintained a blog for a few years (mostly while preparing to take the Cisco CCNP exams) but I haven't wrote regularly for going on five years. It was extremely beneficial to me in several ways.
I ran into an issue with some HP ProCurve switches that HP basically said "yeah, that can't happen". It was only after writing it up -- along with a video -- and someone from HP reading it that they reached back out to me, flew an engineer out to "witness" it firsthand, and fix it. Later, they flew me out to Roseville for a few days to hang out with some of their engineers. Later, they invited me (and paid all my expenses) to attend an HP Tech Day as well as Interop NYC.
In addition, I was invited to attend several Net Field Day [0] events where I got to hang out with some very smart people in the networking industry in Silicon Valley. Stephen Foskett, the guy behind NFD, knew about me from my blog.
Also, while I was at one of the NFD events, I got an e-mail from someone who "knew me" from my blog. An ISP in my area needed a new Network Engineer to replace their main guy who had just left. They were about to start doing some new things and needed someone with lots of experience with OSPF and BGP in particular. After I returned, I met the owners to chat over breakfast one morning. I've been working there a little over five years now.
I've done a handful of small "side jobs" as well, mostly for smaller companies whose IT guys found me via a Google search and reached out to me for assistance.
Last, it's certainly not making me rich but (even though I really haven't written much in the last five years) the ads that appear on my blog (and Youtube videos) still earn enough so that Google has to send me a 1099 every year. Beer money. :-)
ETA: I actually wrote up a similar post, "Why You Should Be Blogging" [1] in 2011. It was kinda sorta aimed at others studying for Cisco exams but I think it's probably general enough to apply to the HN crowd as well (I haven't re-read it recently, TBH).
[1]: http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-blogging...
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#38Blogging is waste of time. Most of blogs are paid PR/Marketing/SEO content that is low quality click-bait. Like this blog post that is PR piece for company that author works. Engineer should sharpen theirs skills on github. During interview github profile is much larger hiring factor than blog.
> Blogging is waste of time.
It certainly is a waste of time for improving your engineering skills, it's a myth. But it isn't for PR, which is very important these days even to get somewhere in software engineering, not to mention for pushing any kind of product or attracting other engineers to hire.
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#39Thanks to Beeminder I stuck to blogging for a while (my results, such as they are, can be found on my website) even though I wasn't happy, and they are all full of horrible grammar. The only thing I learned from the project is that I really don't like blogging, I want to build stuff.
What's the link to your blog?
Re: Engineers Should Blog
#40Yeah I agree with this that most software engineers should consider this. It's another way to set yourself apart from the masses that most people will never put in the time and effort to do. The idea that other people put forward that you should only write about things if you think your ideas are innovative always seemed silly to me. A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important infor…
> A lot of things we think of as trivial could end up being useful and important information to someone else.
This is very true. There have been many, many times when there's a technical article on the top of HN on a topic that I would never have imagined writing about simply because it seemed too basic or "entry-level". There have even been a few topics that I had actually considered writing about but dismissed it, thinking to myself "nah, everybody already knows that".