Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?

I think this essay best summarizes the benefits of starting a blog:

[1] https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/

Personally, I’ve found 2 major benefits for publishing my essays:

1. Any time I encounter a problem, I write it down as an “essay idea”. Most of the time, I solve my problem without anything interesting to write about, but sometimes I have an “aha!” moment to analyze. People trick themselves into thinking they understand something, until they start writing. Deep writing makes it extremely clear when you have no idea what you’re talking about. And so the writing process helps me solve problems, and hopefully helps other benefits from my findings.

2. Conversations become more interesting IRL. When I go to parties, people who read my blog love hunting me down for follow-questions and ideas. And I sometimes get summoned into circles with “Oh, Taylor recently wrote an essay on this! Where is he? Call him over here!”

[2] https://taylor.town

Thanks very much for your positive vibes. Might be that writing for this website has helped! :)

Interesting. So you mean more, the content rather than the form? I noticed you used the past tense. How did you get through that if I may ask?

I wasn't fishing for compliments, but I will gladly take your positive feedback! Thanks dude :)

I would be sad to know the exact number but that immediately came to mind the first time I read an article from you. I desperately wish the world wasn’t like that and I’m sorry you have to deal with it.

> having more to lose, personally, as you get older

Or, as an extension of that, having others tightly depending on your continued existence and well-being.

Has been brought up a couple of times in interviews, led to a couple of small consulting contracts. Also really solidified my learning; you never learn so well as when you are trying to teach.

But the best surprise is that my personal blog occasionally showed up when I was doing a google search years after writing a post.

Are you founder of Japan.dev?

I can't prove it, because I don't have data: my GitHub page is useful.

My CV is two pages long, and it's still too long, recruiters don't read it, probably just look at the keywords or IDK how they work. Previous version was 17 pages long, it was a bad conception (just listed projects, etc., as described in the book, of 30+ years).

But if you look at my GitHub page, you can get a far better picture. I only have my own repos, so you get a relatively good idea of what I do, how I work (most of my projects have documentation, tests), what quality code I write, even if the picture is a bit biased, because of some non-public and of course work projects are not included.

https://github.com/ern0?tab=repositories

How did you bring down the scammy company? Could you provide more detail while still maintaining adequate privacy?

I think it's perception mostly.

In 2000 when some random guy asked a 13yo "hey wanna cyber" the answer was "lol ur a creep", today they'd call the police and there would be newspaper articles how Whatsapp is failing to protect our youth from online predators.

People just seemed to worry a lot less about the internet 20 years ago.

Oh god I have gone down a rabbit hole how. I have a custom font family that I'm probably gonna reuse across my other projects. This is your fault.

Here it is in action: https://xeiaso.net/blog/coffee-isekai

Absolutely nothing.

It's down QQ at least for me

1. Recognition and place within a community.

* Some of my new colleagues admitted reading my posts when searching for something. * I was confident linking my (commercial) book in a subreddit in which I post useful and free articles.

2. Improving as a writer.

* You need to write to improve writing (obvious). * Better writing helped me to write and publish a technical book.

3. Marketing.

* I used my blog as a main marketing channel for my book when I released it.

Note that I haven't started for those reasons per-se. I started long time ago to simple share knowledge on the internet.

Great thread. So many good ideas here.

I used to write on Blogger.com. One time when I was attending a team meeting of a new startup in town, junior devs were asking me that they really enjoyed reading about my college experience which I have posted about on my blog. I never expected this but writing sparingly had made having conversation easier for me few times.

I recently did a consolidation and merged 3 of my different blogs into https://bhupalsapkota.com.np (tech, writings and short poems on my native language). This move was inspired by Seth Godin as he recommends frequently about publishing on your own domain.

My friends at college back in the days (2006) loved my short poems and whenever I had a new post it'd be a topic of the day in uni. Good memories.

I am hoping to write more coz I enjoy writing. But, I struggle with ideas and topics. Any suggestions how do you keep up?

made me realize my unpopular opinions weren't as unpopular as I thought. It's just lots of the places I frequent are echo chambers.

I write my private blog so I can reflect on the day and what matters.

It helps me gather my thoughts well. This is just a private blog, hosted on my local PC ...

I use this: https://github.com/guilt/mblog

I do write about some things on my public blog. It happens every few years.

https://blog.karthikkumar.org

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Nope. I had a blog back in 2003-2010 I finally just shut it down because all I got were spammers trying to comment.

I now am selling the domain because some celebrity gamer in south korea has that exact match name as my nickname domain and twitter handle.

I was offered 40k a year ago but declined.

It got me my first programming job.

Back in 1984, I wrote a BBS for a Vic-20. It had multiple rooms (message areas) which users could create and make public or private, private email and an online game, all in 9.6K of BASIC. It was very popular with each user spending an average of 70 minutes on it. One of my users hired me as a programmer, saying "Anyone who can write a BBS for a Vic can program!"

Thirty years later, that same guy wanted me to work with him at Google.

For that matter, I just skimmed through it during lunch break and found the "Roll model" article hilarious.

Mine has led to nothing. But I learned a lot from other people's blogs.

I know most work deserves to be money driven. But I love how the programming community keeps this social-driven effort. Hope people never stop writing great blog/articles just to keep the art of programming growing.

I'm not very active here, but I've had a personal site since 1995 and my main domain since 1996. I started blogging on LiveJournal in 2002. I installed WordPress on my site shortly after it was released (2006 or so, I think?). I have the LiveJournal entries in the WordPress blog now. I have another site now, too, where my professional information lives.

I've gotten several consulting gigs and met some lovely people because of my sites. I got my current job because an executive ran across one of my sites, then tracked me down on LinkedIn. That's the second one I've gotten because of them.

Thanks for explaining. I was curious.