For those of you that write for corporate engineering blogs, what's the motivation/incentive? Do you feel it's more rewarding to write for your own blog or a corporate engineering blog?
Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
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Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#2In my experience, it’s used as a recruiting tool. High quality talent is usually attracted to orgs with a transparent culture, and well-written blog posts show that the culture is healthy to external talent.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#3I did it for a while, for "exposure".
Now I keep my own personal technical blog that I consider a technical diary of the things I learn each month.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#4I do not write corporate engineering blogs. I write truthful, and sometimes funny, engineering blogs. The blog used to be a source of genuine truth and engagement, now, they are too often sterilized, and boring. I know my writing would be "prettier" after being through a corporate editing pass. Here´s me channeling the BOFH: https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/trouble_in_paradise/
Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#5In my experience, it’s used as a recruiting tool. High quality talent is usually attracted to orgs with a transparent culture, and well-written blog posts show that the culture is healthy to external talent.
Actually, while I like a well written corporate engineering blog, it is knowing that the individual voices within an org are allowed to blog, and for that matter, post emails to mailing lists, without oversight, that I find attractive.
If a company does not allow its engineers to participate on mailing lists and in the open source processes... sigh. There are an awful lot of stilled voices out there.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#6In my experience, it’s used as a recruiting tool. High quality talent is usually attracted to orgs with a transparent culture, and well-written blog posts show that the culture is healthy to external talent.
Not sure I qualify as 'high quality talent'....but I have rarely read an engineering blog where I didn't think, "It would be fun to work there."
To be fair, if the culture is disfunctional I'm not sure that anybody is blogging about it, and I doubt they pick dumb mistakes and bugs to blog about. "After three days of troubleshooting DNS, and a two hour blamestorming session, we checked the logs and there was a leading space. Don't be like us, kids."
Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#7https://docusaurus.io/ with its mermaidJS (diagrams as code) plugin.
i am working on turning my portfolio into a docusaurus site
i like it because it offers:
markdown docs w/ markdown diagrams, markdown blog, pages (as JSX)
- I'll use the docs aspect for two sections:
1. a set of portfolio projects
2. a set of boilerplate projects as a demo of my favorite devops & dev stack along with a brief description & tutorial for setting up the boilerplate.
- the pages aspect as the main page of my portfolio website, and maybe 1-2 other pages (perhaps one on career progression and one on the value proposition of my services)
- and then I'll have a markdown blog easily available as well, which I plan to use once a month or so to discuss what I've learned that month.
seems like a good & organized setup to me.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#8I'm aging faster than I understood; have made basically no big impact on the world; am too burned out to be motivated towards such ends; do not believe in "afterlife"; likely won't have any children; and my cats are sterilized and won't outlive me anyway. Engineering blogging feels like my best chance at a little slice of Immortality, at least enough to feel "productively" occupied.
Oh, did not notice the corporate engineering thing at first. We don't have one after being acquired, but when we did the motivation was basically for recruiting purposes. Also surprisingly for internal documentation, people go to Google which indexes public websites but they don't search internal Confluence and Github Wiki articles
Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#9[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why do you write engineering blogs?
#10Some companies increase their SEO presence with it, I'm against it because this spam ends up in search engine results but consider:
- how to make app in : generic story and hire us
- is still relevant in : big surprise, it's more relevant than ever and we got you covered
- new features in : literally cherry-picked changelog enriched with SEO without adding anything new, our experts already make use of it
Worst thing is there are some good pieces of insight but they get buried by the rest