Ask HN: Did you personal website help you get hired? Tell about it

if you make a website - you need constant inspiration, and a theme that will be a constant companion, otherwise it will not be a website but just a stillborn plug. serious blogs are created when the author simply does not have a place inside himself, because the information itself spills out, and the blog is just a place where he puts it out. nothing more.

and if you ask for advice on what is best - most likely it is better not to do it. or is it just a rhetorical question to check - how many interesting answers will there be for creating new blog topics? )))

This totally got me my first job - I hadn't mentioned it at all on my CV, but I was able to talk at length about it once I realised it was relevant to the role.

Going forward I blogged and tried various things on social media, again just for fun - but I was regularly able to either apply learnings to my roles, or more likely just have interesting other examples to refer to in interviews. It meant I understood FTP, buying (and selling) domain names, DNS, basic coding and most importantly had a good handle of what could go wrong (e.g. people abusing image hosts and url shorteners that I played with).

Note I am non-technical - I was a moderator>researcher>producer>product owner>Chief Product Manager during this time - but the little amounts I learnt about web technologies in my own time, helped me to better talk with my technical colleagues and to my non-technical ones.

The YouTube channel seems to have helped quite a bit there too. Some companies see the sub count and are instantly intrigued lol.

But my personal website probably hurt me more than helped.

I guess it was a great learning tool.

Blogging is a call one has for sharing his own ideas with the world.

Blogging is where you can share what YOU care about, in the writing and detail style that you like.

That's the only way you have to make it interesting and unique.

During the interview they asked me lots of technical questions around the website, like why I chose particular solutions, what the trade-offs I made were and how I did certain things. Essentially, I just had to be able to show them I could technically discuss the website in detail and I guess also proving that it was I who did the work.

What I also only realized a bit into the new job was that merely "releasing" a working project is in itself a bit of an accomplishment.

[0]: https://mordritch.com/mc_rss/

Because I write about technical things a lot, it's often been viewed as "evidence" that I'm an experienced technical writer as well as an engineer.

But, it (and my github account) have also been flagged as "risks" by a recruitment agency though: I can be a bit sweary at times and they felt that having a project called F*ckAMP might put off potential employers. No-one else has cared though.

But, to echo the advice that others are giving you - the "power" of my blog lies more in it being stuff that I want to write, rather than stuff that I'm writing because I think that it'll help my career.

Deciding what to write about can be hard, and sometimes you'll find you hit a block and don't write about anything at all. Those are both fine, just write about stuff when you want to and don't pressure yourself to write "just because".

I got my second job because of the forum, my third one because of my website. Not that they contacted me directly but during the technical interview, my interviewer was a reader and pretty excited to get me on the team. With an Ai era, it would have been more difficult I guess. The good side is that writing allows you to make connection in your brain and in the outside world.

All the best

As long as one sticks with it, I cannot overstate the power of a good personal website.

> Also I can't decide what to write about, and whether to make it more nerdy or more professional.

As with most decisions, just make one. You can always change your mind later.

- Making your website more unconventional will result in more variance of opinion. This can be really good if some people especially like it (ofc, others may especially dislike it!).

- I consider my website as controlling the top Google result for my name. Also, my email uses my domain. So people I email will also likely visit my website, which hopefully leaves a better impression than LinkedIn would.

- If I apply to something I care about, I can see in the logs that someone from there likely looked at it. So from that I can say it likely helped with grad school admissions, and certainly most clients have looked at it before hiring me (in fact many have mentioned it positively).

In one of my interviews for a job I will start soon, I mentioned a side project and one interviewer pulled up my site there and then to look at it.

I don't know that it made the difference, but I'm sure it helped!

As a solo consultant back in the 2010's, I created a website and blog for personal branding purpose.

* Blog articles about engineering, got well indexed on Google, getting me thousands of monthly visitors. * Articles about business / functional aspects never really got any visibility nor engagement.

So in the end my content has been mostly helpful to peer developers (mostly in India and the US), and did not reach my potential clients / employers in Western Europe where I am located...

I do not know how much effect the website had to recruiters, perhaps it still gave me extra points sometimes...

As a JavaScript developer writing open source applications eventually became a problem in regard to hiring. I could easily spin up an original application that does wonderful things, but other JavaScript developers can’t. I was no longer compatible to the employment.

A few months ago I wrote a post on the butterfly effect of having a blog for ~9 years, it covers some of the more interesting things: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/the-butterfly-effect-of-havin...

Turns out I like teaching MUCH more than I like fixing prod.

Edit: it is perhaps worth mentioning that my blog looks like absolute shit. It is literally a stock ghost.org blog with the vanilla theme and fuckall customization.

As an argentinean a way to stand out and have US companies look at me is through my dev blog

https://mikealche.com

But I think blogs mostly help if you write about a very niche topic that might attract the attention of a potential employer. Else Github would be a better source of guidance for the interviewer.

These days you get technical challenges to test if they are what you expect (and many companies overdo this).

In a way my personnal website sells myself.

Three years later, I began receiving job offers through my blog, which led me to try freelancing as a web developer. Fast forward seven years, and I've never had to actively seek out projects, because clients have consistently reached out to me via my website. In fact, blogging has allowed me to stay fully booked as a freelance web developer. I had freelance gigs at governments, at a DAO, at enterprise companies and startups which reached from code monkey positions to lead positions.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. But would I start blogging in 2024 just to get job offers? Probably not. The developer content landscape has changed significantly, with many more people now blogging. However, if your goal is personal growth and learning, a well-maintained blog can still be a valuable way to attract clients.

AMA :)

[0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/