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

I’ve had a lot of real consulting work (not just students wanting me to do their final year projects…) from my blog and YouTube channel.

https://atomic14.com and https://www.youtube.com/@atomic14

The other benefit has just been the fact that my side projects are actually getting finished and documented.

Not massive for connections (Twitter interactions are better for that) and not great for jobs directly (I've had 2 people in 8 years contact me about contract work [i.e. not even full time] that I was not advertising about based on posts).

The most use I get out of my blog in retrospect is that it has a decent amount of minimal working sample code/configuration and I reference these snippets frequently.

But writing itself is part of making sure I understand a concept. So it's not just about the retrospective view but also about what you can learn by not just hacking on stuff but also explaining it in writing.

My personal website I see as my legacy. When I die, it will live on for awhile, and people can get some use of my life that way.

Mostly I'd be pretty annoyed at myself if I didn't know how to deploy a basic website anymore. Keeps me young :|

Don’t know about my blog itself, but looking at my drafts,

A) I can see how many ideas I had that fell apart the moment I started to write arguments about it

B) how horrible I am predicting stuff and just how much I’ve saved myself from being on the record with really terrible calls on the then future that is now the present :,). This too because once I started to justify my prediction I lost all confidence in it. I still think fpv drone racing could have been bigger than f1 though. Someday I’ll publish that as the hill to die on :D.

For work, as a software developer, pretty much all of it has come through Linkedin, it's the laziest way a recruiter will look for staff. Keep that up to date with what you can and want to do and you should be alright in that industry.

Personal websites can help, if they're looking for more of a thought leader than a pair of coding hands.

I've been maintaining my blog (https://brooker.co.za/blog/) for just over a decade, and I continue to do it for a couple of reasons.

- I often blog about research, which has started several very interesting conversations with academics and industry researchers, and even some very fruitful collaborations. Mostly I cover systems, database, and distributed systems work.

- I believe that the ability to write well is skill with great career and personal benefits (see https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/11/08/writing.html). Writing my blog gives me practice in a kind of writing I don't do that much in my professional life. I think it's had a considerable positive impact on my writing skill overall.

- It gives me a way to broadly share things I've been thinking about (e.g. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/04/11/simulation.html), using at work (e.g. https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/02/28/retries.html or https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/01/06/erasure.html) in a way that I find personally fulfilling and enjoyable. I got into a habit for a while of sharing this kind of thing on Twitter, but eventually found that leads to shallower conversations and shorter-lived artifacts and went back to mostly using my blog for that kind of content. I find that I genuinely enjoy teaching and sharing. I also like sharing my ideas without the overhead and formality of academic publishing (which, let's face it, is a painful process).

- There are a whole lot of folks with blogs that I enjoy and admire, and want to emulate them to some extent.

I think that goes beyond vanity, but also think I have limited ability to understand my own motivations, so it may just be vanity :)

I run a small blog that is based on a tiny custom script and a single markdown file. It builds static HTML files and deploys them using rsync, it takes less than one second to build and deploy. There is absolutely no technical maintenance required and I only publish things when I want to.

The main use of my blog is that I note things down that are interesting to me. List of certain things, some learnings, the results of tool evaluations, etc. I use my own blog almost daily to look up things I can't remember clearly but know exactly where I can find them again. I sometimes also share some articles with colleagues. Other than that, I could not care less whether somebody actually reads it. From the Google Webmaster Console, I do know, however, that dozens of people end up on my blog every day.

Would I start a blog again? Yes, absolutely.

Website: Point of contact.

I don't use social media, so if people search for me, they can find my website.

Blog: To ventilate and network.

My blog posts have landed me job interviews and have expanded my professional network.

But I mostly blog because I write a lot. I write to myself, and sometimes I think it's valuable to others, and then I have a place where I can share that and link to it. For example, when my colleagues make sketchy code, and I can't find a good place that explains why you want to think about it differently, I'll write a blog post.

I've been running a blog at https://xeiaso.net for almost a decade now. It has been the single best decision I have ever made in my career. It allows me to skip technical screening interviews. It has made interviewing at companies _easy_ because I have _already proven_ that I understand what I'm talking about.

Learning how to write well also makes it so much easier to explain things succinctly, especially when working remote like I prefer to.

I've also been told that more junior people look up to me as a role model because of my blog, which is something that I am still getting used to, but I can accept.

    p, .conversation-chat, blockquote, em, strong {
        font-size: 1rem;
        font-style: normal;
        font-family: Menlo, monospace;
    }

In my interview for my current position, the team mentioned some elements of my website in a positive light, so I think it helped me stand out a bit.

Otherwise it's just good for bookmarking links and ideas that I'd otherwise forget about. And it's handy to link to friends if they ask me about my hobbies, e.g. "here's what I remember about X off the top of my head, but if you want more details and links to reference material, there's a section dedicated to it on my website."

In short, brings me employment opportunities, and customers for my business.

I wouldn't have been referred to my current job without it.

I wrote some technical articles on Dwyer.co.za. Mainly for fun. Partly because I wanted to 'give back'. Partly because I found the articles a good way for me to learn stuff and often found myself referring back to them later.

I got inbound leads from people asking me to write similar articles for them and a book deal. I started charging small amounts at first and then larger ones later on.

Now its my full time business (ritza.co) that pays me a better salary than I was earning as a full time employee and supports several team members.

I would say having a blog can easily be life changing, but is worthwhile even without that just for the personal growth aspect.

My website has given me a place to share projects I've done or small snippets I've learned about. I am always writing as if I am the audience, as I'm referring to it quite often.

Over time I've noticed that readership has increased and I've started to get comments from readers either asking for additional help or offering advice. With that also comes a ton of companies offering their paid services to improve my seo ranking....

Overall, it's a nice stress-free place to write.

https://www.greghilston.com/

This is actually pretty fitting, but I had been looking for a new job and working to polish my site into a better portfolio. I had written a piece about "The Future of Group Messaging" that I had worked really hard on, and once I finished it, I posted it on HN, fully intending to reach out to recruiters to find work. However, it ended up gaining a lot of traction on HN, and from that post, I received about 25 inbound job offers that I was able to choose from.

I still think back to how stressed I was while building the site, and I thought it was such a waste of time. But it got me the job I needed at the time and opened a lot of doors for me. That said, I could theoretically attribute it to HN and my writing, though the custom site helped.

I use it to force myself to write up better notes about how I did stuff.

Having a blog was one of the recommended marketing strategy for ebook promotion, so I started one. Most of deep dives on topics I'm familiar already made it to my books, so initially I wrote stories around my writing experience.

Then I started a mini section for random stuff like what bug gave me trouble. To become more regular, I reused stuff for tips and tricks (along with video demos).

I don't use analytics, so don't have numbers to indicate how useful it turned out for ebook sales. My friend found one of my posts as the top result while searching for a topic, which was very satisfying to hear.

When I first created my website (https://hjr265.me) several years ago it was mostly a placeholder for the domain that matched my preferred handle/username.

Ever since I started the 100DaysToOffload challenge, I have been writing a bit more frequently on my personal blog: https://hjr265.me/blog/.

Apart from it being a writing excersie, I have been forced to look at my own work more critically before presenting them on the Internet.

I now find it more important to understand new concepts in-depth, as I learn them, so that I can explain them better.

I think about learning things that are beyond what I need for my regular work.

And, yes, I admit that I have used my blog at least once to vent about something.

I have a website. I haven’t had any tangible benefits from it. I keep it mainly for SEO fodder if someone searches my name.

My favourite win of my development blog is stopping myself from doing the same project multiple times. I used to tinker a lot, but wouldn’t document anything and so I often had to start all over when I picked that project back up.

Writing forces me to break things down into manageable chunks. I’ve seen much more consistent progress this way.

https://devtails.xyz

I started my blog on August 24, 2004, posting multiple times daily, and I continue to do so because I enjoy it.

It's a way of seeing what I think.

I get about 500 page views/day (down from around 10,000 visitors/25,000 page views/day around 2010-2012).

My Comments section since the beginning has always been completely open: no login required; no delay; no editing; no moderation.

I'm one of VERY few bloggers today with completely open, unmoderated comments: I get about 10/week, which lets me respond/interact to each one if I want.

Bonus: EVERY comment goes on my homepage at the top of my Comments section the moment it appears along with the commenter's handle — it's one way to get a tiny measure of internet fame cheap.

I haven't changed my blog's appearance apart from tweaking image size since I started.

I used my blog to display a portfolio of projects I had worked on to prepare myself for leaving academia and go into industry. It paid off massively, as a random linkedin recruiter saw the flashy looking web viz I built (an utter pile of garbage html and D3) and I got a job at a hedge fund, leading me to a very lucrative career trajectory.

Mine started as a personal blog, and now generates $2M USD/year revenue of training, consulting, and online services.

I regularly preach the gospel of, "Find the most expensive thing in your business, stand next to that, offer to help fix it when it breaks, and blog about what you've learned."

For me, that was Microsoft SQL Server, but the specific tech doesn't matter. Follow the money.

To me it is like shouting in the wind in a public park. I am not concerned about who sees it, but it will out last me :)