Ask HN: How much do employers value an online portfolio/blog?

[leejw00t354]

Is running a portfolio or blog a good professional move to make? Has anyone here ever been hired or been offered work thanks to their online presence?

How many hackers out there run their own personal blog?

[danielamitay]

Me: Final year college student, iPhone/iOS developer, NYC.

My blog: Personal app milestones, interesting app statistics.

Traffic: 5k unique/month, >100k back in June 2011 (when I was active).

Every so often I receive unsolicited (but much appreciated) offers from SV, NYC, and Israel to work at a startup doing iOS development or management. A number of these have been well funded by top-tier VCs. What drives my traffic? A blog post detailing the most common iPhone passcodes, a blog post detailing how piracy doubled my legitimate sales (despite it being a poor post), and another blog post describing how to programmatically detect the apps installed on the iPhone.

In my opinion, a personal blog is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise to those who are interested, and a way to increase your luck surface area.

Side note: I like Bump (YC S09), and I duplicated a minor feature of theirs (app detection in v2.X). Because I blogged about their feature and how I did it myself, a few people at Bump read my post. Later on, I found out that the CEO of another major company was referred to me for advice by them. I'm probably nothing special to Bump, but when I graduate, if I want to go work at Bump, I'm not just another name.

[naithemilkman]

'increased your luck surface area'

This line is gold. I've been saying the same thing but I use 'increase the probability out outlier events'. Yours sound much nicer :)

[mschaecher]

I was blogging on startups while living in the midwest getting ready to move to SF. Blogging got me meetings with people at Google, Twitter, Square and Airbnb. I ended up as employee #17 at Airbnb. So yea, it helped.

[yashchandra]

Definitely a good move. The idea is not just that you might get hired. The idea is to get visibility to the outside world of people, share what you know and learn more in the process or just enjoy yourself while you blog. Of course, your chances of being somebody from nobody goes up significantly.