Ask HN: Is having a personal blog/brand worth it for you?

It's definitely worth it for me as my blog doubles as a repository or personal notes, projects, and ideas I reference often. And sometimes I get noticed, so far without further opportunities.

What made me blog way more, from once per month to nearly daily, was to switch to a lightweight, low-friction hosted blogging platform. Now the tool fades away and blogging feels fun.

Good question! Yes for me it was worth, I also switched from Medium to personal VPS (on DigitalOcean) + Jekyll (https://giuliomagnifico.blog), I spent lots of time to configure all the things but now it’s worth, I learned lots of things and I’m really the owner of my posts for few $/months (5$). I’m also using, for the analytics, Umami on a free Heroku instance and it’s very useful to ditch Google analytics, since now it’s also illegal in EU.

What I think is missing online, is a minimal blog service that is also fast to use and not expensive, something like a minimal Ghost or Squarespace for 5-6$/month. I’m using it for my portfolio (https://giuliomagnifico.it) and its a great service but it’s also way too expensive (20$/month) unfortunately!

Self hosted, hands down. The big tech lost all credibility in being a medium for your voice. They can't help it, they want control over it.

Said that, is worth for self-referece as the very least. You'll see the evolution of your subjects of interest, styles and voice.

For example, some post might be useful for referencing in a future interview.

Completely. Every single progression in my job over 24 years (I started blogging in 1998) has come through my blog. Some of those were huge.

Self-hosted is the way to go. Start small; post on a regular schedule; comment on other peoples' blogs.

The simple (hosted) WordPress site that I occasionally push write-ups/notes/opinions to has landed me more than one job, along with other opportunities.

Its well worth it tbh.

I enjoy writing and making videos so the “reward” is the work itself . I wouldn’t stress about it too much. Just turn the Notion page to a public site and ship it.

I don't have a brand, but having a personal website is worth it to me, on a personal level, it shows the stuff I've done through the years, some people might find it useful, but the primary thing for me, is to have it so that I can look back at what I've done, and serve as a practical way to show stuff to people who are interested.

I've been blogging since forever but the classic <Title>/<prose> style got stifling. When it looked like Twitter was going to hell in handbasket I implemented a "tumbleblog" that's a lot more free-form and where I don't have to have an entire concept before writing.

My blog has never led to any professional advancement, it's purely self-expression.

It is valuable activity if you like doing it. I think just forcing yourself to do it for the sake of it is a mistake.

You can publish your Notion pages to the internet for free BTW :)

I think you should always own your own content. For example iff you review a movie on letterboxd or IMDB or a book on Goodreads or maybe do a longer review of a product on Amazon - duplicate the same content on your own blog. Or just a markdown file on your own drive.

That way you can copy the same content to as many platforms as you want, but you still own the original if the service goes down or decides your contribution isn't worthy.

I wrote one blog post that accidentally landed me in a newsletter.

I thought I'd want to try and do it on purpose, and that attempt landed two requests to interview.

My reason to write anything was always a need to express myself rather than seeking a goal.

Peaceful ranting.

I had a similar path:

  - started with personal notes (hackmd.io)
  - when something seemed publishable, started a dev.to blog
  - eventually moved to a self-hosted platform (getzola.org)
  - due to overwork stopped publishing, but still keep personal notes

The self-hosted platform did become a maintenance burden.

I've blogged in fits and starts, but it always seemed to fall out of favour because I wasn't too happy with the platform (speed, aesthetics, etc.)

What seemed to work for me was realizing that I am not blogging for others, for meaningless internet points, etc. I blog for myself, and I blog publicly on the off chance it helps someone.

That's all. No pressure, no commitments.

I forked the blog example in the Next.js repo (hosting is free on Cloudflare Pages, and Vercel) and just started regularly writing about React.

I spend maybe a couple of hours on each article. I learned to be a better writer, and its helped me professionally.

My favourite part is googling common problems I wrote about, and finding my own articles still there, like past me helping current me.

Site is https://maxrozen.com if you're curious.

Absolutely, yes.

My blog ( https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com ) is primarily a way for me to share teaching material around React, Redux, JS, and TS. Most of my blog posts have been written in response to questions other folks have asked that I've answered repeatedly. It gives me a way to write a longer answer _once_, and share it going forward.

A few top examples:

- "A (Mostly)" Complete Guide to React Rendering Behavior": https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2020/05/blogged-answers-a-...

- "Why Context Is Not A 'State Management' Tool (and Why it Doesn't Replace Redux": https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-diff...

- "The History and Implementation of React-Redux": https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/11/react-redux-histor...

- The slides and videos for my various conference talks: https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/series/presentations

I've never had a specific goal of "trying to get noticed" per se, but I've certainly done a lot of "hey, here's this post I wrote that answers your question". And yes, in addition to brain-dumping my existing knowledge, I often end up doing additional research while writing posts.

As a result, I've had numerous folks tell me that my posts were helpful and that they learned something, which is really all I wanted out of this.

(side note: my blog is still using an ancient version of Hugo, 0.17, because that's what was out when I started. It's simple, it works, and I have no reason to change it :) )

well, when some companies started to place Google ads on my name I realized there might be some value in my personal brand.

did not get it via blogging but via conference speaking and a book. blog is just a channel.

For me the biggest thing that helped my "personal brand" wasn't so much the blog, but was taking some of the blog entries and submitting them as talks for programming conferences.

Being a speaker at a decent size programming conference, opens up a lot of networking opportunities.

The blog provided an outlet for me to make an idea into something more concrete, as well as allowed me get early feedback on the idea. I used this to refine the idea into something that would be of interest to a larger audience.

Yes (my blog is on my profile).

People email me about things I’m interested in, and I’ve made new friends through it too.

It's nice to look back and see my progress — taking on harder projects, and writing more clearly.

> Does the time spent writing feels worth it to you?

Yes but I've always enjoyed writing.

> Did it help to get noticed/ find jobs or other opportunities?

Yes.

> Do you learn something new from it?

Yes, by writing for it. And, I suppose, by "running it" I learned more about the frameworks I've used.

Worth? Yes, in terms of self-confidence maybe (when it gets referenced in other places) and some other times it's helpful venting. But I don't believe it has influenced my career in any direction. And as I blog about actual experiences, I don't learn anything new from the act of blogging. All in all, yeah, valuable, but not enough to make it worth more effort.

> Personal

Not in this day and age when you might lose a job if they find out you support Trump or aren't on-board with progressive egregores. Too much risk.

I have a personal blog on Blogger. It's zero work to maintain but I mostly publish on a platform where I have an editor who also handles promotion etc. I have more flexibility on my own platform but honestly I have more demand to write professionally in places that will handle editing/promotion/etc. than I have time for and I have more reach there.

I have been writing for my personal blog now for a year. The time spend writing and editing does feel worth it. My writing is a lot better than it was a year ago.

It helped me to get noticed at my work and to make new connections.

You will always learn something about the stuff you write. To write better, some new way of doing something, or something from the comments.

I run my blog through cloudflare pages. I only have to push a new markdown file to github and the Hugo template and cloudflare do the rest. Took only a few hours to setup correctly.

I have a blog I generate from org mode files. I think it's better for my mental health than comments like these.

I think these answers are going to suffer a lot from survivorship bias.

It's worth it for me in the sense that I blog to process my thoughts, learnings, projects, and experiences. Blogging helps me do that, and since that's the point, it's worth it.

In terms of getting noticed/finding jobs, my blog (https://liza.io) is not super high traffic or anything. I don't market it. I don't even usually tweet about my new posts, even though Twitter is my one active social media platform. But I have had recruiters mention checking out my blog posts and sometimes reference my blog content. I've also had interviewers mention my blog and ask about personal projects I've written about in the past. I also used some of my blog articles as supporting material when applying for a position that featured a lot of technical writing. So I think that even though improving job prospects is not the primary goal of my personal blog, it has been a bonus.

Another bonus has been getting occasional emails and comments from random readers to say a certain post has helped them. A while back I wrote a post about testing external API calls in Go, and have had a few people reach out to thank me. Though I write primarily for myself, it's always nice to see when someone stumbles across my content and appreciates it.

It's also always cool when a post ends up in newsletters I've never heard of. I don't have a consistent way to detect each time this happens, but can sometimes trace back traffic through a referrer or notice a backlink from a newsletter archive.