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Have a personal web site

writing.markchristian.org

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Re: Have a personal web site

#311

Post by mturmon »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #170
raffomania wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like a big audience is the only thing that matters. The linked post talks about a personal website as a digital identity. Giving people a link so they can find you online is a good reason to have a website, even today. Besides that, making your own website is rewarding in many other ways - Being creative, getting thoughts out of your head, pinning down certain arguments you tend to repeat, etc.

> Giving people a link so they can find you online… …does not always work. When I give people a link they can't click on, they type it in the search bar . And not even in full, they tend to strip the http://www and .com ends. And you can't click on a piece of paper, which is where my CV typically ends up on. Last week, I interviewed with someone who said he googled me. All he found was a "little GitHub page". My full…

Your personal website, btw, is really great, and that interviewer missed out. I program mostly Python in scientific contexts, but it's great to have your perspective on some larger questions of programming style and technology.

Re: Have a personal web site

#312

Post by awj »

otikik wrote: post #137
_hardwaregeek wrote: post #61

I don't judge a person's technical skill through this metric (or at least I make an attempt not to), but it's rather noticeable when someone has nothing going on online. A blank GitHub, no website, no projects, etc. For an employed person, eh, whatever, maybe they just have a life. But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracur…

I used to think the same way as you. Until something happened in my life that changed me. I used to have a very fruitful open source life. I have a personal website, a blog, etc. Some of my libraries are useful and reasonably known on my niche. Then I had a child. Everything changed after that. I suddenly don't have time or energy to devote to open source any more. I am the same person as before, but if you looked at…

Indeed.

Unless I find a big chunk of time today, I'm 0/4 on a resolution to write a post a month this year.

Expecting people to build content in their spare time builds in some hefty assumptions on how much spare time and energy they have.

Re: Have a personal web site

#313

Post by Diederich »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #213
bloopernova wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My goal was to contribute back the same way. YES! So much of our computing-related triumphs come from documentation that other people wrote. Even super basic stuff that no senior developer or sysadmin would dream of asking, that stuff still needs to be written down by someone. I have a dozen or so Markdown documents of varying sizes that I need to finish, proof and polish before putting them online. I sorely lackin…

My quotes file recently reached 1MB of plain text, 160,257 words. I started this file 17 years ago! This is enough to fill three average sized novels! One day... I might have a go at weaving a narrative through it.

Link please. (:

Re: Have a personal web site

#314

Post by spudlyo »

dejawu wrote: post #263
loosetypes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm a bit jealous of his (Mostly) food truck name ideas, https://writing.markchristian.org/name-ideas/ . Once, in the functional programming rabbit-hole, a coworker advocated for a hypothetical Indian food truck named Haskell's Curry. And when I was studying propositional logic I certainly wouldn't have said no to a side of De Morgan's ColesLaw.

He forgot the best two: Gyros and Villains Spaghett-about-it

I had an idea for a Vietnamese Italian fusion joint called Pho gettaboutit. Rice noodles, rare beef, and tripe with Bolognese sauce and garlic bread? Mmmmmm.

Re: Have a personal web site

#315

Post by username223 »

neilv wrote: post #91

I started running a vanity domain name around 2000, for email and Web, and have a few thoughts based on that... Hosting chronology something like: home Linux box on ADSL, 2 different shared hosters, 1U in a colo facility, back to earlier shared hoster. For my real-name vanity domain, I went with a `.org`, since I didn't want to be a `.com` in personal life, though today I'd prefer `.net`. (The longer story behind thi…

I wish I had bought a vanity domain sooner, mostly for the web hosting flexibility, but also for the email (despite the pain of getting past Gmail's spam filter). It's mostly stock Wordpress, but it gets the job done, while only looking slightly dated.

I went with ".com," not because it was a commercial site (it isn't), but because most people assume that all URLs end in ".com," so ".net" or ".org" would have been confusing. I can tell someone I'm at $DOMAIN and not have to specify the TLD.

Re: Have a personal web site

#316

Post by lucb1e »

jzzskijj wrote: post #139
naavis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article said that the applicant googled the interviewer, though.

Yes, right after posting I realized I wasn't directly on the topic. I hope it brings some value to discussion anyway.

For what it's worth, I was initially confused as well. It's convolutedly phrased.

Re: Have a personal web site

#317

Post by all2 »

onion2k wrote: post #234
all2 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've considered rolling comments I've made here into blog posts. I'm not sure if that's a fox paws[0], though. [0] I know. I did it on purpose.

Jokes are like code. If you have to explain then it's probably not very good. ;)

I take great joy in awful jokes and puns. For some reason they make me very happy.

Re: Have a personal web site

#318

Post by rchaud »

prennert wrote: post #189
stakhanov wrote: post #77

A lot of commentary around recent development on the web kind of falls into a common theme of "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do WWW like it was 1997 again?" The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content…

Maybe someone should build a seach engine that only indexes pages without ads. That would mainly be private blogs and wikipedia, I guess.

That's a great idea! I've been thinking about how it would be possible to classify "personal" sites using a common identifier...lack of ads would be a good one, although that would still grab the majority of corporate blog sites.

Re: Have a personal web site

#319

Post by gf263 »

jaabe wrote: post #13

Some of the most interesting things online are people writing about things they are passionate about, for the sake of writing about them. At least in my opinion, so it’s fair to say that I agree with the author. I think it’s an equally delightful experience to journal about things though. I do it from time to time, when some subject just needs to get written down, almost as though the journaling is me thinking out lo…

Journalling is extremely fulfilling to me and writing about things that bother me quiets my mind.

Re: Have a personal web site

#320

Post by _hardwaregeek »

intertextuality wrote: post #153
_hardwaregeek wrote: post #61

I don't judge a person's technical skill through this metric (or at least I make an attempt not to), but it's rather noticeable when someone has nothing going on online. A blank GitHub, no website, no projects, etc. For an employed person, eh, whatever, maybe they just have a life. But for a student? I'll admit I get a little suspicious. I'm not saying students should have a huge roster of projects and crazy extracur…

This is an unbelievable attitude. "Oh so you call yourself a mechanic, huh? Well you aren't blogging about cars and mechanic-related things in your free time, so I'm suspicious". "Oh, an architect, huh? You don't have an online presence, which is worrying". I'm baffled as to why people expect programmers to spend most of their time behind a computer, and to make social git commits or blog about it on top of that. I p…

Oh boy talk about straw man. Look, I directly said I do NOT do this for professionals. If you spend the majority of the day behind a computer programming, you are NOT obligated to have a blog or projects.

And again, I am NOT talking about programming for hours on end for students. 50 commits a year is approximately working on a side project once a month for a weekend, or going to maybe 3-4 hackathons in a year. Maybe that's an unreasonable burden, but that's not exactly a lot of programming.

And y'know what? Other jobs require extracurriculars too. If I wanted to get a job in politics, I'd have to take unpaid internships. If I wanted a job in business, I'd have to network. If I wanted a job in medicine or law, I'd have to study for the MCAT/LSAT. Programmers are no different. If you want a job, you do need to practice outside class.

Again, if you didn't read this and simply want to make an angry reply, I am NOT speaking of full time professionals. Simply students.

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