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Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

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Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#321

Post by philip1209 »

ksec wrote: post #142
simonw wrote: post #88

Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…

My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off. And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a…

Or put a Mac mini in your living room: https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#322

Post by zelphirkalt »

flpm wrote: post #256
zelphirkalt wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About point 2: I have yet to have a job interview, in which the interviewer has even taken a look at my website. Well, actually I don't know that, of course, but what I want to say is, that none so far showed any sign or indication of having taken a look, and as a consequence also no sign or indication of knowing anything about any of my showcased projects. In 95% of the cases it was just that they want to do their o…

Also a hiring manager. I always do. For me a good personal site is a huge step towards a phone interview. I look for things people do not because anyone told them to do (college projects, internships, work), but because they were excited about it. That initiative and excitement is what will set you apart from the other 100 resumes that look exactly like yours.

I hope you can "infect" others with this kind of view, so that more people adopt it.

My CV currently also includes a link to my repositories and a page briefly describing some projects that got anywhere. Far from all of my 100 or so personal free time projects get finished, but some do, and those are described and linked in my CV and on my website.

At least I do get interviews, which must mean at least something, and sometimes it's just the role that is not fitting. Often it is their tech stack and they do not believe in engineers learning things on the job, looking for a perfect match. Sometimes it was some test that they do, that presumes some knowledge about some library or that is some specific leetcode thingy, that I wouldn't code that way anyway, if I had the choice.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#324

Post by simonw »

caseyohara wrote: post #318
wkat4242 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people. I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my read…

This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.

Yeah, static site generators solve so many of these problems. There's a lot less that can go wrong if your hosting is entirely static files out of S3 or Cloudflare or nginx or similar.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#325

Post by bostik »

simonw wrote: post #324
caseyohara wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.

Yeah, static site generators solve so many of these problems. There's a lot less that can go wrong if your hosting is entirely static files out of S3 or Cloudflare or nginx or similar.

Or as in my case, lighttpd, with all its CGI, user-input processing or dynamic execution modules not even loaded.

Makes for an attack surface that gets delightfully close to zero.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#326

Post by tiltowait »

I recently started a blog to document some service migrations and other random musings as I adopt FreeBSD (after a decade-long hiatus). It's fun to write and think about this stuff in a shareable way, even though I expect no one[0] to ever read it. It's also been fun using a new-to-me SSG (Hugo).

[0] Correction: I have had three visitors, not including myself.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#327

Post by SoftTalker »

ghaff wrote: post #112
simonw wrote: post #88

Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value. 2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they co…

Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.

I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up.

I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't write about anything that someone else with much deeper expertise hasn't already written about.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#328

Post by Kerrick »

cushychicken wrote: post #246
DLion wrote: post #224

There are so many benefits around having a personal blog that I'm surprised about reading all these negative comments. I started blogging about tech and security when I was 13/14 years old in my native language. Then, when I felt more mature, I switched to a new blog where English was the main language. I started improving my language skills, getting some donation from kind strangers for my blog posts and using it as…

I think there’s a lot of people out there who don’t want to believe written communication skills like these are as important as raw technical skill.

That's really interesting to me. I consider writing to be a "raw technical skill." Programming and writing are inextricably linked. The lexicon of software borrows heavily from writing: language, syntax, grammar, statement, and expression. Even the way we critique code heavily overlaps with how an editor critiques writing: consistent, readable, elegant, concise or verbose, and follows a style guide.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#329

Post by chemotaxis »

lightveil wrote: post #151

the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my politica…

If you're working as an individual contributor, I'm sure it can matter, but usually doesn't. It's widely accepted that people have personal opinions and politics, and that it can even extend to not liking some of the decisions made by the company you're applying to. There are workplaces that might screen for ideological purity, but it's rare. Both because it's illegal and because hiring is hard even without additional self-imposed constraints.

I think the only thing that can derail a job application is if your personal blog makes you look patently unreasonable, either by supporting causes that are socially unacceptable ("it's OK to hit women") or getting way too angry over mundane stuff ("everyone working at Microsoft should be shot"). But if you just happen to have an opinion about a politician, whatever.

Where it gets dicey is if you're in a leadership position, especially director and above. Then, you're sort of paid to keep your opinions to yourself, because when you have an organization of 100 people or more, at least several will disagree with your politics and will then judge your actions through that prism, leading to drama and possible HR fights.

Re: Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

#330

Post by moffkalast »

tiltowait wrote: post #326

I recently started a blog to document some service migrations and other random musings as I adopt FreeBSD (after a decade-long hiatus). It's fun to write and think about this stuff in a shareable way, even though I expect no one[0] to ever read it. It's also been fun using a new-to-me SSG (Hugo). [0] Correction: I have had three visitors, not including myself.

So two LLM scrapers and Google's indexer then? ;)
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