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

[zulrah]

I'm curious if people here find blogging as a valuable activity from the following perspectives: - Does the time spent writing feels worth it to you? - Did it help to get noticed/ find jobs or other opportunities? - Do you learn something new from it?

Personally, I tried writing in some blogging platforms (medium, dev.to etc), then moved to self hosted solution with Hugo but honestly it was too much maintenance. Writing up my thoughts in presentable state took too much time/effort. Right now, I simply save my notes to my personal Notion for future reference.

[xena]

I've found it worth doing. My blog (xeiaso.net, formerly christine.website) is the main way that I get employed at this point. It also helps that people link it here a lot. After 100 articles or so writing got a lot easier and now people rely on my blog for a lot of things. I think it's worth it, but I've also been exclusively self-hosting it. I currently have the code (and writing) open source on GitHub (https://github.com/Xe/site) but I'm considering moving the writing to either a private repo or a SQLite database because people keep copying it, slathering it in ads and rehosting it.

EDIT: also because independent personal blogs are a rarity now, having a decent one means that you can really stand out from the crowd.

[cableshaft]

> people keep copying it, slathering it in ads and rehosting it

Didn't occur to me that could be a thing, but of course it is. People suck.

[behnamoh]

> My blog is the main way that I get employed at this point.

I don't use my blog (https://medium.com/@parttimeben) to get employed, but it has helped me organize and document my thoughts. For example, when setting up a new machine, I've always needed to keep track of what I installed before, what worked and how I got it to work, etc. Sure, I can google this stuff again, but just writing about my experience helps a lot.

I'm actually writing to my future self!

[branon]

Hey I read your blog a lot and it's definitely one of the more impressive I've seen, I don't write much (yet) but the structure and style of xeiaso.net is something I admire and would like to emulate

[yusefnapora]

Thanks for your blog! I've learned a ton of great stuff (especially about Nix / NixOS) and it's always fun to read.

[the_arun]

Your blog looks awesome!

a) People who copy blogs could copy anything public.. correct? That shouldn't stop you from blogging.

OR

b) By copying, did you mean they are forking your git repo & hosting it with a wrapper on top of your content?

I'm assuming it is (b) you are worried about.

[heinrichhartman]

Thanks for writing these blogs! Always appreciated finding them here [1].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[charles_f]

> because people keep copying it, slathering it in ads and rehosting it.

Never occurred to me that was a possibility, but wouldn't you know, my last two posts seem to have copies on other people's blog

[LVanguard]

Oh wow. This reply came at a great time as I've been at the beginning stages of grappling with the benefits of having a publicly available personal blog. I've always had starts and fits but never really gave it the time of day it deserved. I think I'll want to commit to it at this point. Best way I can think of achieving that (via Atomic Habits) is just to commit to writing the same time of day, everyday. Never even thought of the whole "It could help your employment prospects" angle.

[ehzy]

> private repo or a SQLite database because people keep copying it

Couldn't they just as easily scrape it from the site itself? Or is that too high a bar for type of scum we're talking about.

[Gipetto]

Nothing you do, aside maybe from putting it behind a login, will prevent your content from being ripped off. Its just a sad part of what we have to live with.

[Sholmesy]

I was looking for inspo for my own blog the other day and saw yours as like the pinnacle of what a tech blog could look like.

[dharmab]

Thanks for these blog posts! A couple of them are on the study guide we give to new hires who are new to Go.

[Antoninus]

read christine.website for a while! keep it up!

[cpach]

Your blog rocks!

[alexpotato]

My personal story:

I read patio11 over the years and was struck by his often mentioned "Write about what you know and it will surprise you the value it will add to people" (paraphrasing). In particular, in one of his posts about consulting he mentions: "Some of my consulting engagements were essentially me doing a dramatic reading of my blogs posts."

I realized that for the past couple years I had been coaching my friends through salary negotiations and general career advice as well. This led me to start a blog and write about some of the ideas and stories I used to help people get a better understanding of how to negotiate a compensation package, how to think about switching jobs etc.

I then posted it to Hacker News and didn't get any response at all for the first couple posts. Then one of them took off. I should mention that when that post did take off, I thought there was a bug in my metrics script but no, not a bug, it did indeed hit the front page of HN.

~30 people reached out and a couple turned into paying clients.

So answer to the question "was it worth it"?

- From a personal financial perspective, better than not doing it

- From a "wait! you can write things down, people read your words and then pay you money to hear more?!?!?" perspective, I can't think of a more worth it experience

PS There is this one distinct memory from when I did a free consult and the person said "I read your blog and thought to myself 'If I'm ever switching jobs, this guy is the first person I'm calling' ".

[cosmodisk]

I don't have a blog, but your first paragraph resonated with my recent experience. I know some stuff and even though I often doubt my capabilities, I've been doing it long enough so you simply get to know some things that aren't in a book. Recently I got invited to an invite only event. Small online setting with people from some very interesting companies. It's summer,so fewer than expected showed up, but it was fine. So we start talking with the host expected to take a lead on the whole thing. Turns out that I knew way more than others. People started asking for contac details,tell stories how I did x,y,z. What I assume as basic knowledge is chargeable consulting hours to to others. Sharing that kind of knowledge in writing would only help my case.

[PrayagS]

Can you please share a link to your blog?

[PragmaticPulp]

From the hiring side, I always spend time reading people's blogs, Github, or social media if they make an effort to include it on their resume.

9 out of 10 times, blogs are extremely stale content from 5+ years back. A lot of people start blogging at the beginning of their careers and then just stop. This creates a weird frozen-in-time effect where what's shown on their blog doesn't match their current skillset at all.

I've read enough personal blogs that I know to look for timestamps and put it in context. If I see a "Ruby on Rails TODO app MVP" blog post or Github repo dated 8 years ago, I'm not going to use that for consideration in hiring them.

However, not every resume reader is going to be that considerate. If your blog isn't up to date, you may want to omit it from applications to avoid giving someone the wrong impression that you're still a beginner.

[sandyarmstrong]

The trend to remove dates from blog posts is problematic for just this reason (as well as being reader-hostile).

[miscaccount]

The number of interviewers who even read resume, let alone a blog is very minimal. Even if they read it , i doubt people would be asked the same questions as one who has no blog.

So in my opinion the return of investment in terms of hiring is close to zero. However it can be a great tool to document your journey or learning and how much one has evolved.

[ellisv]

Guilty! Well, not quite 5 years but my writing has slowed down a lot. As I get older, I have less time to write and spend a lot more time on other hobbies and obligations.

[monksy]

There are 2 reactions I have to your comment:

1. I agree with you. I like seeing people's blogs. It's great to see the way that they contribute back to the community.

2. I feel that your judgement is a little misaligned. I personally have had a blog (it's still there and I can still blog) However, to be able to get an audience who reads it, you can react to other blogs, and they can contribute to yours just isn't there. It feels like you have to be an influencer to get any kind of traction. I just want to have it so I can get feedback etc.

Also: I have a draft of a blog article about seperating out your content from the display and syndication. It's the tim berners lee before he published the solid web manifesto,however that draft has been unpublished for probably more than 10 years now.

Additionally.. I have discovered with the industry is that it's better not to over stress yourself out with side projects and hustle attempts. You just aren't awarded better jobs because you blog or invest yourself like this. You tend to signal yourself better to managers who see "oh he codes after work.. that means he'll love to code my project for free after work".

[bunkerbewohner]

Your comment just motivated me to write another blog article about something recent I've learned. Thanks ^_^ My last post had already been more than a year old :O

[mfjordvald]

I feel like you're personally attacking me haha.

I don't really need it for getting jobs but I definitely moved on to other topics and just never kept up with the blogging.

[nicolas_t]

As a side note, I miss reading blogs from people. I remember 12-14 years ago when google was still useful to find information, I would often stumble onto blogs that had a lot of relevant info. For example when looking for reviews about a private school, I'd see a blog with someone whose kids go to that school, when looking for reviews of a restaurant, I'd see someone with reviews on their blog, etc...

Now it seems that whenever I search for something, I only get content farm and search engine optimized garbage.

I do get that now a lot of this has migrated to instagram, tiktok and/or youtube but it's not searchable (and it's a lot less useful than it used to be)...

[podviaznikov]

I've been writing online for almost 10 years now https://podviaznikov.com/writings

The best part for me is receiving some random emails from time to time with people saying they liked my post or poem or something else.

I don't have expectations for those letters though. Intentionally I don't have google analytics on my site. When I did have it, it influenced how and what I was writing.

Now I just write for myself. And if my writing happens to be valuable to someone else - it's a bonus. Mostly I write when I want to offload some thoughts about some topic. When I finish thinking about something, I write it down and that topic is "closed" for a while.

Also, what helps me to write and publish is my setup. I changed setup many times. When there was friction to write and publish - I rarely did it.

[cphaynes]

How long have you used https://montaigne.io/? Never heard about it before; very interested.

Love the simplicity of your site, by the way.

[adityaathalye]

Ah, I wrote almost exactly this! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32146815

Also, I love the simplicity of your site. Cheers!

[kk6mrp]

Does it have an RSS feed?

[drakonka]

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.

[quickthrower2]

Keep it up, there is a nice quality about this blog. I think it is an example of the older blogging style that many are fond of. Sharing thoughts without being promotional.

[Kaze404]

Nice blog! Your simple layout coincidentally shares some resemblance to mine (https://leite.dev), and I thought that was neat.

[dmor]

I have been blogging for 15 years, and it has been worth it. Some years I only write a couple posts. Writing helps me clarify my thoughts, and while I publish just a fraction of what I write for myself the act of sharing it gives me a small thrill. A few times a year, someone will read and reach out and it is a much deeper form of connection than social media comments/likes.

[jbandela1]

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.

[parksy]

I'm highly self-critical so I'd go through phases where suddenly I'd decide I need to be on-brand and delete all my stories, musings, music, non-brand-related stuff. Only to get anxious later and think "now I just look like another self-promoting schmuck" and with my inner voice whispering "what worthy endeavour have you contributed to the industry to deserve the acclaim you're begging for", I'd delete and rewrite all that "narcissistic" brand stuff and post some quirky stuff for a while. Rinse and repeat.

Granted it's a very "me" problem but was worth it for me business-wise? Not really. I just found it made my anxiety worse. Maybe in the future I'll start up something small and low key and pseudonymous but I will definitely not be wanting to tie it in any way to my sense of self-worth, my work, or anything like that. I'm glad it works for many people but for me it's just not worth it on a personal level.

In terms of finding jobs etc, I just try and do a great job on my contracts, be honest and open with clients, be friendly and check in with people from time to time to see how business is doing. I get longer term and much more fulfilling work through the people I know and have worked with previously, granted it took years to establish a small network but none of the blogs or articles I wrote ever attracted any attention beyond my own obsessive self-doubts.

[raesene9]

I've been blogging a while now (~18 years), I find it worth it from a couple of perspectives.

1) Writing forces me to think through things clearly and when doing things like walkthoughs I often find things where my understanding wasn't quite right, so it helps there.

2) I often return to things I wrote a while back where I can't remember the details of a specific topic.

3) I appreciate when other people take the time to explain things, nothing like finding a good blog post when you're researching a topic, so this is my part of helping out.

4) Getting the odd message from someone saying they appreciate something I've written about is nice :)

5) It's helped my career. I now work in a field where I'm paid at least partly to write (security advocacy), and I've had companies approach me to talk about jobs based on them having read something I wrote.

In terms of the tech. I use, I keep it super simple. Jekyll and GitHub pages, so there's no server maintenance, just write markdown and publish.

[mooreds]

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

100%. I've been blogging since 2003. It helps clarify my thoughts. It helps me learn things. It helps me see how much I've learned and changed.

I wrote a bit more about blogging for myself here: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2188

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

Umm, a bit. I've gotten a bit of contract work from it. I've published a book from my blog (yet to earn out my advance). I've been in job interviews where people mentioned my blog. I was asked to be on a podcast because of something I'd written (but only because it trended on HN).

But no "Dan is making $Xk/month from his blog and only works 10 hours/week."

> - Do you learn something new from it?

Yes! I have found that I've never learned something so much as when I tried to explain it. And explaining something using words is so much harder than interactively; you have to be clearer and you have to be more rigorous.

Examples:

https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3244

https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2832

[gwbas1c]

I don't blog much. Maybe 1-2 articles a year if I'm lucky. A lot of my attempts end up half-finished, and never published. (I just have too many other interests and get tired in the evening.)

BUT: What really made a personal blog worth it for me was writing my own blog engine as a learning project. I hadn't done much in the Node.js stack, so I wrote my own blog engine to run in Heroku. Maybe if I have some downtime between jobs I'll do it again, too.

My blog engine isn't anything special; but it achieved my goals: To get a feel for Node.js and the general state of web development in April-May 2020: https://github.com/GWBasic/z3

[diamondap]

It's been worth it for me, though not yet in the way I had expected. I write novels when I'm not coding, and I maintain a self-hosted blog about reading and writing mysteries and thrillers. I had hoped to draw a loyal audience of readers who would buy my books, though I never actually implemented a coherent readership-building strategy. I just wrote about whatever I felt like.

Turns out, a handful of like-minded readers, authors, and editors have gotten in touch through my contact page. Those contacts have opened up a number of opportunities and helped me develop a network.

I had a larger following on my Facebook author page years ago, but I didn't like the platform or the company. I stayed on solely for the author page. Judging by the number of followers and post engagements, I seemed to have a broader reach there. But I can say the actual engagement of those followers was much shallower.

People have contacted me through my blog for film rights and European publishing rights (neither of which panned out). They've given me free copies of books by other authors to review. They've invited me to write articles for their sites, and more.

I wouldn't say my blog has helped develop a brand, but it has definitely been useful. And it's never a chore if you just write when you please about what you please.

[raphlinus]

Yes definitely, but my situation is unusual. I use my blog primarily to publish research results. A typical post is halfway between a typical blog post and a peer-reviewed paper in an academic journal or conference. I've been dipping my toes into the latter and have not been having as good results. Basically, a blog is more efficient in use of time, and I also like the voice where I'm trying to explain things to a broad audience.

I really don't like Medium - I did a few things there before switching to GitHub Pages. The point of writing is to reach an audience. Why accept friction to juice their monetization?

And yes, there's no question my blog opens doors for me. For example, I recently got invited to give a keynote at RustLab this fall, and I'm sure that was on the strength of a blog post I had done on Rust UI architecture.

[somehnacct3757]

I found I only have something really worth saying every few years which isn't often enough to make my blog be content marketing for my personal brand. I do like my blog, I can read things I wrote a decade ago and still believe in them. Any sort of artificial cadence would undermine this.

Also as I get older I find the hot takes I used to write down are not interesting enough to share in article form. They live better as comments or tweets. I'm more aware of nuance in everything, and caveating my claims out the wazoo to appropriately constrain my claims is not worth it.

I see a lot of this hot take style writing from other young devs making it to HN front page. So that's not to say this style of writing isn't popular. But it isn't popular with me, and first and foremost I'm writing for myself.

[canadianwriter]

While this certainly gets into semantics, I don't think you need a "blog" but a website can help a lot.

I wrote about why most smaller companies don't need a blog here: https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/humblesuggestion.html

You may say: isn't that a blog post? I would disagree. You can read how my website isn't really a blot here: https://kolemcrae.com/notebook/notablog.html

I'd say a website is fantastic for your brand, and combining that with a fantastic LinkedIn profile can take you far. Needing to blog constantly on the other hand isn't as important.

[Brajeshwar]

I will try to keep this short. I have a history.

My Website wasn't the best or the top but was right up there amongst many popular ones. Once upon a time, I believe it was within the Alexa top 1,000 or something like that. If I can recollect right, it has even seen its millionth visitor in a month. There was also a popular term called Google PR (I need to double-check this term); mine had "8" out of 10 for a long time.

To this day, I get occasional emails from people thanking me for kickstarting their careers because they read and followed my writings.

I will not dwell on those, but here are a few more interesting personal anecdotes.

I got one of my girlfriends because she doesn't trust the visitor counter on my Website. She contacted me via the contact form, "It must be a script. How can your visitor counter jump so fast every second?" "Meet me for coffee, and I will show you the real-time Website Analytics."

I was on a business trip. One fateful winter rainy night, I introduced myself to some new friends at HackerDojo, Mountain View (halfway around the world). Someone on the side overheard and approached me, "Are you brajeshwar.com?" "Yes." "Wow! I followed your blog, and thanks for your articles." That made my night.

My Website's revenue had bank-rolled me for many years while I kept failing with my Startups while continuing to stay in an upscale part of Mumbai.

My Website, indirectly, got me my USA Visa pretty easy and smooth.

I had brought down a business/Startup because the founder was cheating. But later, I regretted that and deleted every article related to that business. I should have never written something like that, and I will never forgive myself for it.

These are the quickies I remember without probing into my mind and notes. Now, I keep it as my Time Capsule. I don't have analytics either (I'm married).

Suggestion: Have a personal website/blog; don't rush. Start today, and have fun in 25+ years.

[dusted]

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.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I maintain a "personal brand," and a lot of that, has to do with trying to remain positive, honest, reliable, and friendly, as much as with my technical acumen.

I do blog, in sporadic bursts[0]. I haven't written much, lately. I tend to write (both code and prose) for myself, as opposed to any particular audience.

I feel as if it is "worth" it, but I don't bother trying to have a high "social media" score. That takes way too much time and effort.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany

[oofnik]

I get a kick out of the occasional "hey, thanks!" from some internet stranger who struggled with some problem that I happened to have solved and written about. We've all been in the stranger's situation at some point, probably more than once, so it's sort of a way to pay it forward.

Other than that, I did get a few positive remarks and interested questions during job interviews. I've even had a home assignment waived after they checked out my blog[1] and concluded that I "seem to know what I'm talking about," so that was a welcome surprise.

Inspiration waxes and wanes, and I make no promises about publishing regular content. But occasionally I solve an interesting problem with an elegant (IMO) solution and get the urge to tell the world about it.

[1] https://badgateway.qc.to