Me, being young and always up for an adventure, showed up and it was awesome. These were legit spelunker urban explorers who knew how to pick locks. We got into the caves and it was crazy. Best part is I didn't get murdered.

A former co-worker used to have a shop on Cherokee Street about 15 years ago. He told me that a neighboring building had access to the caves through the basement, though its owner was too afraid to explore it.

I was almost going to say this sounds crazy dangerous and more like a trap, but 15 years ago I would have done the same and probably came out safe.

I don't know what changed, it feels like things are getting more dangerous, but unsure if it's perception, or the truth.

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

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Curiously, in Portuguese we have "espelunca" which is more commonly used as a synonym for a seedy, shady place -- and now I know why!

Seems there may be a cross-culture notion of caves and sketchy bars having similar level of… ah, “shadiness”. Makes some sense, as I’m typing this out. The dark is where (both literally and figuratively) shady things go down, and it’s hard to get much darker than a cave, so “Spelunke” seems a fitting name.

It's not cringy - I thoroughly enjoyed it! Out of curiosity, were you able to verify the firefighter story?

Edit: I've removed the link.

And, no, i never did verify the firefighter story.

There is a free OCR version available here:

Page 7: https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/142619929/?terms=%22cher...

Unfortunately, I could not find the page 8 clipping on newspapers.com.

Edit: I found the page 8 clipping - https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25694845/the-world-beneath-1...

It looks like this was part of a larger Sunday piece titled "The World Beneath". You can find all six clippings on r22tycoon's newspapers.com account at https://www.newspapers.com/clippings/?user=4850847%3Ar22tyco...

Sure Cave Murder Tour Guide, sure

When it rains, no drains.

Pretty important if you ask me

;-)

My old blog was all for laughs, vanity and stupid terminal tricks. Not much lost.

That led a fellow Canadian to my blog, who asked how I found a job here. My email back to him started to get pretty long, and so I turned it into an article for the blog.

That article attracted more people looking for developer jobs in Japan, so I started collecting their email addresses as I occasionally came across developer job opportunities that didn’t require Japanese.

After about a year of this, I heard a company had made a successful hire through the list, and so I started charging companies.

From there, the business organically expanded, until I was working with many of the major tech companies in Japan.

It’s now a business generating a life-changing amount of income. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t of started blogging with no real intent other than to share what I was learning.

In 2003 I started writing about social networking and education - the replies to that blog post helped me kickstart my first startup.

In 2009 my blog posts about technology ethics led to me giving a talk at Harvard, which led to my becoming the first employee at a media tech startup.

That in turn led to me learning more about media tech accelerators. I applied to one with a new startup idea, and got in, in part because my blogging on the open web was picked up by the New York Times as part of a story.

Blogging for that startup helped us find customers and a like-minded community.

When that startup was acquired, blogging both externally and internally at the acquirer helped me make friends and share ideas that wouldn't have reached the right people otherwise.

And so on. Sharing ideas - not just tips, but thoughts about the why and who behind technology, as well as being vulnerable in public - has let me cut through from being a nobody in Edinburgh to someone with a pretty great technology career in SF.

And even if none of that had happened, writing is a wonderful way to structure your thoughts, consider what really matters, and reflect.

I recommend it. Start a blog - on your own domain, on webspace that you control.

I had procrastinated because other platforms made everything so damn easy, and hosting my own blog meant being a part-time web admin. But I took his advice, and set up http://raganwald.com.

Some years after that, Posterous launched on HN, and I gave it a try. It was great, so very convenient! But I carefully kept copies of everything I posed there, and sure enough... One day it closed its doors, and I republished evrything on raganwald.com (some of my urls are raganwald.com/posterous/xxxxx.html, this is why).

But what about all the links to the old posterous articles? All dead, so some threads right here on HN point to dead URLs. This is bad for me and for HN. For this reason, I personally reject the strategy of posting on my own domain and republishing it simultaneously on some other platform. Everything I write is on a domain I control, and if I get less traffic, so be it. Running my own blog on my own low-traffic domain is like running a store in a building I own. The mall is very attractive, but I'm done with landlords.

p.s. There are hosted solutions that respect you your own domain. Some are free, like... Github Pages. And that's what I use. It is not essential that I own the server, just the URLs.

https://github.com/raganwald/raganwald.github.com

Example: https://simonwillison.net/2004/Jan/22/defendingWebApplicatio... - at the bottom it says "Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/01/22/defendingWebAppl..."

I just tested it and it works! https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=http%3A...

Following up on this - any specific reason behind this? I am considering starting a newsletter soon to first gather audience and Substack looks like right solution for this without requiring much technical setup, esp. as a non-tech. Idea is to first start blogging, get into that mindspace, build an audience and then you can move it to a proper blog on your own website, if required.

Curious what would be your thoughts here?

If you own your own domain, and own the content, you can just walk out and it will still be alive. This is assuming that your content are more important (to you) than the platform.

Once, WordPress was the new MovableType/Blogspot, Medium the new Wordpress, and now Substack the new Medium. You never know.

You need to control your audience to reduce chances of "unforeseen circumstances"

On a different note, what has been the value of "creative posts" and even "creative name for your blog" for you?

I am overthinking this but sometimes I find myself wondering whether my post is really all that useful, that my blog should have a more creative/captivating name to catch audience's eyes etc. Did you ever face that? If yes/no, how'd you suggest to overcome this?

The vast majority of traffic you get to your blog these days will be because somewhere linked to an individual post.

As long as it's readable, the people who arrive to read that post won't care about the branding that surrounds it.

Why do we name anything? There are many reasons, but it's important to distinguish your site from others. Content is the primary way to distinguish a blog because the original consumption tool was an RSS reader. Things have changed a lot, so more people go directly to most blogs.

If you have web design chops then there is an opportunity to create a distinct experience. The value of this is felt most by people who can appreciate good design, so unless you've goofed up usability, most people probably won't notice the design much. Don't mess up the usability because people remember bouncing from those sites or complain in comments here.

There are tons of developer blogs out there so unless you are notable in some area (big or small) for some set of readers then your name may not be enough. "Joel on Software" as a blog name stands out more than "Joel Spolsky's Blog". It is possibly easier to communicate verbally, signifies the content, feels informal, etc.

Does it matter if the content is only useful to you? It doesn't. The act of blogging improves your writing, creativity, tech skills, forces you to learn etc. So, you move forward in area of your career that many software people struggle: communication. If you write about stuff close to the area you work in then you'll find you reference your own blog posts a lot. Scott Hanselman recommends writing a blog post and referencing it an email instead of sending the same content in that email. There is some good stuff linked from https://www.hanselman.com/blog/your-words-are-wasted.

You overcome your problems by dealing with your anxiety. Why do you care about these specific aspects to the point that it blocks you from just writing and publishing? This is the differentiator between highly trafficked blogs and those that aren't. For a subset of people, noodling on these aspects and their blog template is the point itself. You need to decide on the true purpose, the why, and come up with a plan. There are lots of in-between steps like buying a nice template, drafting a lot of content to see if a name falls out of that, adopting a name like "Vibgyor5 on Software" etc.

> If one day you forget to do XYZ task, they can take it all away.

What kinds of tasks? Who's they?

I can see Medium and Substack changing their rules and stuff.

But WordPress?

Isn't it controlled entirely by you?

They is whatever service you are signed up to that is outside of your control.

"Takes it all away" I think is really meant to mean a multitude of things. At the worst end is the service closing down unexpectedly. They may have been impacted by a cyberattack, haven't been paying hosting bills, never tested backups etc. Your site is under something.theirdomain.com and theirdomain.com is sold in a fire sale. Your audience can't get to the site and you can't redirect them.

More frequently there is an abhorrent change to the service from your perspective. Perhaps they start inserting ads into your content, charging for previously free features, or even repurposing your content per their terms that you didn't read when signing up to coolservice.com. These kinds of changes are more insidious. On the lowest end, they may just change their system to be a worse experience for you with some new user interface that you don't like.

You can see how these things are going to go from the start. Startup invests in a nice user interface and they are declared the new darling without any viable business model. They can only operate this way for a while because it's unsustainable. Things change for the worse and the pattern is repeated. Sometimes the new kid considers how to make a sustainable business which can be an anathema in their startup community and things stay better for longer. I've not studied Substack, but I think they may have thought more about this.

>> But WordPress? Isn't it controlled entirely by you?

WordPress.com hosts WP for you. WordPress.org offers the open source version of the product.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Having something you own allows for drift in subject matter over time.

https://fredlybrand.com/2020/05/28/better-writing-better-com...

Also: a domain means links add value to your online identity, not the platform you happened to choose.

Also, at some point in their existence each platform start to decline. People move to the next platform and lose some of their readers. A few years later the same thing happens again, and readership is reduced again.

Personally I have had a lot of fun adding random bits to my website such as small tools, some explorations on creative expression with CSS and things like that.

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.

I imagine the advice would often be "just write", which I do agree is fair advice, but wondering if you had any takes.

But really just work on writing or ideas for writing for half an hour every day. Even if you just write "I have nothing to write about today". Don't be afraid to just keep showing up.

The main idea for me was to just reduce the barrier to entry so that writing more was too easy to avoid. I already use Notion for taking notes throughout the day, so transitioning to also jotting down blog thoughts has been very easy and has increased the amount of writing that I do.

Current steps:

- make newpost NAME='even a temporary title is ok, but a permanent one is better'

That creates a file with the headers and a couple of skeletal bits in the right place, then opens it in my editor.

- make rsync

That publishes it.

(Maybe the trick is: if you must tinker, also turn that tinkering into writing?)

Most of my site update posts are just my notes from tinkering with things turned into prose.

Start by writing to yourself. I started with writing down ideas in a private markdown system. (I’d recommend https://obsidian.md today.)

I became less self-conscious about my target audience was myself. It also became easier to make assumptions about what they (I) know, which is still a game of “will I understand this in a year or two?” For me, writing about tech to a near-future version of myself was the beginning.

Another tip: You may be in control of your documents (you maintain them, not some online system you don’t own), but if you use someone else’s blog platform, you won’t have a chance to rabbit-hole the site making. There’s something liberating about only caring about the content, not the layout.

For some subjects, it helps to write under a pseudonym, because you can experiment with what’s on your mind and not how people will treat you based on what you say. I’ve wanted to write about things like pornography and past jobs (those are unrelated, hehe), but I don’t want to upset past colleagues or seem obsessed about pornography.

I have only written one article at the moment, but I am glad I got started with it. I hope to keep adding to it over time and have a few articles in the works.

Please keep at it with writing! It's a super valuable skill that so few people actually use. It really sets you apart in the job market and is so underrated from a professional standpoint.

For example after trying multiple SSGs, I eventually settled on the simplest combination for me: Caddy with markdown files

Wrote about it here: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...

I already had Caddy running for lunar.fyi and lowtechguys.com so it felt simple to just add some lines in the Caddy file and start writing words in .md files.

"This code is free as in mattress. If you decide to use it, it's your problem."

https://xeiaso.net/blog/GraphicalEmoji

Thanks for all the knowledge sharing and education efforts you put into all sorts of areas I am interested in (Linux internals, NixOS, Rust, etc.)

Can you please elaborate more on this? Do you just go "I made a post about it, go read?"

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

I'll figure out something, I'm sure.

It’s one of my favorite fonts for code, but I also used Input Sans as a font for writing in Obsidian and Ulysses for a while. It was very good!

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

Concretely answering the questions asked:

1. At various points I spent a lot of time maintaining, but now it's just a static blog deployed via Github Actions onto a Github Page. I haven't done any meaningful changes in a few years, and the changes are for fun, not necessity

2. I got my first job in tech thanks to blogging: https://lethain.com/datahub/

3. My blogging has made it possible to write two pretty successful books: https://staffeng.com/book/ and https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle (working on a third now)

4. Hard to assess, but I believe I've been able to subtly but meaningfully advance the technology industry through my writing :-)

5. A significant majority of folks are unaware that I write, and that's great! I don't think impact depends on folks connecting their colleague to the writer or whatnot

- Dick Guindon

Half the time, I find them really interesting and an interesting perspective on corporate psychology.

The other half of the time, I read them and have no idea what you’re talking about, which leads me to worry that my trajectory in my engineering career is doomed to insignificance, because I never have any of these meetings with execs or high level people like the ones you describe.

Do you have any guidance for people like me, in the second scenario?

In 1996 I was a teenager and my dad taught me html and ftp. I wrote a website with some cheesy poems and drawings, and uploaded it to geocities/athens/acropolis. Also, I put links to my page on several web directories. A girl from another city read that website and sent an email to me. It would be untoward to tell the rest of the story.

I joined them shortly after and a year later I sold Readlang to them. In 2021 Duolingo IPO'd and I'm now financially independent, which may not have happened if not for writing about it on my personal blog.

(Oh, and I really ought to write another blog post about buying Readlang back from Duolingo last month!)

[1]: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/the-sound-of-encroaching-...

https://thenewstack.io/javascripts-history-and-how-it-led-to...

You discussed how the diff algorithm improved from O(n^3) to O(n). I'll never forget that talk.

I went with x because Xmas. And because Christopher is such a common name I wanted something different.

I wonder why you went with v, another uncommon letter.

[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

This often actually stops me from writing. A short ways in, I realize I have no clue what's really going on. I start reading to learn more, then I either get discouraged by the complexity of it, have a crisis of confidence, or plain run out of time, and fail to ever come back to complete a post about that specific topic.

I would encourage the OP to create their own website and share it with their friends and workmates.

I went through a similar journey in 2020 and all I can say is that I wished I had done it sooner. I started writing articles when the pandemic hit, and bought a domain / published my articles there last year.

Reason for doing so was an overall lack of confidence in many things:

- Lack of confidence in my written English

- I had just changed jobs, leaving a technical role for a non-technical one. As I had joined a technical team as a Data Program Manager, I was afraid that my new workmates would have zero respect for me if they thought I was unable to do their job

Almost two years later, my personal website has gotten me some job offers through LinkedIn, and most importantly it has helped me feel more integrated within my new team. I'm writing "feel", because I have no evidence that I wouldn't have been accepted or respected if I hadn't had my website.

My English is still pretty bad, my technical skills are even worse. But I really see this website as a confidence booster for anything I do.

For those who might be interested: http://blanchardjulien.com

Thanks for reading!

[0] https://www.cyberciti.biz

[1] https://twitter.com/nixcraft

[2] https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft

- Won a stupid writer's award at ~20yo (Opensource.com's Reader's Choice Award). Still proud of it.

- Gotten me my first internship.

- Gotten me a couple of TV interviews in my early 20s (not a lot of tech people in my country had a prominent public presence).

- Gotten me a couple of all-expenses-paid trips to like a dozen of conferences (some regional, some Europe-wide).

- Had a lot to do with me getting a Mozilla fellowship.

- Easily reached four to five digits within a day on a couple of occasions. Always followed by criticism, sometimes fair, sometimes unjustified.

- Was once threatened to be sued by a CEO of a web agency or a hosting provider (can't remember) from a neighbouring country because I kind of elevated his homophobia. It was amusing.

Best decision I could've made for myself in my early career, it really helped me stand out very quickly (in my tiny country, not guaranteed).

Since then, nothing, but that's kind of intentional. I barely publish anything. My Obsidian is full of finished posts that are never gonna see the light of day because I'd rather do anything else than deal with internet drama.

Maybe it's because I have no comment function. But it's nice. Had some interesting conversations that way. Makes the Internet feel like it's inhabited by real people.

I've also got a bit of press in part through my website activity. The New Yorker, Deutschlandfunk.

But I mainly have a website because I like having a website. It's weird, experimental, unusual and disorganized just the way I like my coffee.

https://www.marginalia.nu/

- 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 :)

- Got my first big speaking engagement in USA (I’m in India).

- Got my small service company acquired-hired and got introduced to the world of Startups.

- Bought a car, paid rent, and bootstrapped a few Startups.

- Got a Girlfriend. A girl emailed that it is impossible for the live visiter on my counter to be speeding so fast (she suspected I might be cheating with a script that just increase the counter). I got a date to proof that my website was indeed that popular. Once upon a time, my website was pretty well visited. If I remember correctly, it did slipped in within 100 top Alexa Ranking (I’m fuzzy on this but it was hot).

- Bought down a scammy/spammy company with a single blog post. But felt really bad within 5-6 months, and wiped out the whole content and apologized to the business owner. He did what he did but I should not have done that, which killed a business.

- Helped a lot of businesses/startups launch by writing about them and felt really happy.

- I know, at-least, one big tech company quoted my article as one of the sources for their patent.

- Quite a few people have emailed me saying that my website shaped their career and I feel really happy about them. In-fact, there was a parent that emailed me as their son got the inspiration from my website to pursue a tech career. He was very happy when I called up and talked to him.

- Of course, if not directly, my website played a vital role in a lot of interesting freelance/contract work that came - Disney, STARZ, Pearson, Cambridge, etc. Well, I got an almost-free entry to Disney World, Los Angeles for about two years around 2005-2007. ;-)

- One rainy evening, I was with friends at HackerDojo in Mountain View. A guy behind came up and asked, “You are brajeshwar.com, right?”

- Also, I have gotten a lot of legal takedowns, threats, copied/stolen without permission and what not!

I restarted late 2021, after over a decade off-web. Back then (in hindsight) it was me trying to look clever. I used to dislike my writing.

These days I'm fairly happy with my posts.

I try to be correct, but not clever. In fact I'm happy to be corrected --- that's the whole point! I try to write in my own voice, but I don't aim for literary finesse. I don't write for any particular audience, but I do share links in communities of kindred gentlenerds out of common interest.

Several wonderful conversations have happened so far.

The most unexpected was a brief conversation with the grandmaster Douglas McIlroy himself. I'd cold-emailed him a thank you and linked to my post featuring his famous shell pipeline. I received generous critique and advice. That week, I was walking on clouds :)

I've also had a couple of unexpected (and nice!) "front page of HN" experiences.

Recently, one of my blog posts on my Org Mode workflow hit the front page. If my analytics is to be believed, it has taken on a second life bouncing off various parts of the Internet. That front-paging was warm on the heels of another recent Show HN I did of my site maker (written in Bash), which generated some lively discussion :)

Overall, I'm quite pleased with how it's going!

My read of this was that it might've meant to frame the possibilities: "Exhaustively, is it for career development, or is it a moral failing?"

Additionally, "vanity" seems a bit loaded, shifting the perceived tone to possibly annoyed suspicious/accusatory, like maybe the writer suspects the answer to the implied either/or might be the latter category.

This read could be off, or maybe the writing hints at the writer's self-critical reflection on whether they should have a personal blog: when their only conscious goal would be career development, and they'd consider any other reason in themselves to be vanity, which they'd want to avoid?

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.

Now I get about one every 1-2 months.

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.

If you knew no one would ever read your writing, would you still write it? If yes (the likelihood is no one will read it apart from your future teammates) you'll have found your subject.

It can give you jobs, learning & connections, but it also takes time. Time that can be used for other things that could get you the jobs, learning & connections you want without writing. There's no one way to approach it, you need to find what works for you.

For me - I've written a lot (mostly as principles), but only recently I've focused on learning how to write, which meant I needed a blog to write on and a way to make it fun for me ( https://principles.dev/blog/first-principles-thinking-a-visu...)

1. I used to write technical pieces on Medium aimed mostly at people starting out their careers. I suddenly blew up and made reasonable money from it for a little while and that blog (before and after blowing up) was a big factor in me landing both consultancy jobs and a full-time job.

2. I now write almost exclusively on my personal website (https://yakkomajuri.com). I get no money out of it and few people read what I write, with the exception of some posts getting on the front page here once in a while.

It's fantastic: I've kept up with my love of writing and have allowed myself to just write about anything, including pieces that show a lot of vulnerability. This culminated in me publishing some poems a couple weeks ago (in Portuguese though).

Beyond that, my website is super bespoke, using a static site generator I built, and it's vanilla HTML/JS/CSS. It's refreshing to write dumb code with almost no deps. I also learn a lot through building it and writing on it, and have expanded it to include different areas of interest (pictures for example). Overall, it just _feels good_ to have it.

Ah, I've also started to write goals publicly which has been a nice experience too.

- I got to the front page of HN a few times. Definitely a vanity thing, but it was fun!

- My posts on dynamic programming, which got a lot of traction, resulted in someone I knew reaching out to ask me to speak at a conference they organize. The conference didn't result in much professionally, but I love public speaking. It was just a great experience.

- I mentioned off-hand that I got to talk about DP, and that got me connected with someone who was able to create a video course on the topic. I learned a ton thanks to their guidance on things like how to organize smaller chunks of information that build up to a bigger course.

- Another post about mental health got me a chance to be interviewed on a podcast. I'm a huge podcast listener, so I was ecstatic about actually being on one!

With the confidence from the 12-month experiment, I then decided to write weekly about hiring in the tech industry, a topic I'm passionate about. I kept that up every week for over a year! What came out of that is I had a bunch of thoughts floating around in my head, and now I have them documented. Now if I want to bring up something about hiring, I probably already have an article I can just link instead of explaining it from scratch. The same actually applies to some topics on my personal blog.

EDITED: Regarding that last point, I've been setting up a Raspberry Pi after a few years. Having some notes documented has been invaluable for myself.

Before you accuse me of selling out for a free book, I would like everyone to know that I totally sold out for a free book and I would do so again.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2018/5/book_-_making_the_monster_by_kath...

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.

It turned out to be quite popular and since I started the blog in 2013 it's gotten well over 1.5 million visitors and still attracts hundreds every day, exculsively from search traffic.

While I can't say that it changed my life in any way, it did bring me a lot of satisfaction that it helped many people. It also taught me about the concept of "long tail keywords" on Google!

You can find it here if you are interested: https://snippets.khromov.se/

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.

This is a perfectly good reason to blog. Maybe the most fundamental.

Useful not only for software tech stuff.

A few years ago, a friend gifted me a domain name, and simultaneously, I signed up to AWS so I could goof around with all the free-tier cloud features, and basically just learn some cloud architecting.

I quickly settled on the Bitnami image of a MediaWiki stack on top of Ubuntu. It was fairly easy to get set up, but of course I quickly realized why the average Joe does not want to do this sort of thing. I had to be my own sysadmin, which I knew fairly well, but I also had to be my own CISO, and the logistics of running a bare OS on a VM on the public Internet are definitely daunting in the 2020s.

I attracted futile probes of my ssh port and I also attracted some sort of spammers to create throwaway MediaWiki accounts. In fact, the aforementioned friend showed me a few security holes in my MW configuration, and I was thankful he did it and not some malicious stranger.

Eventually, MW failed in some perplexing way, and I was frankly appalled at the myriad ways that AWS costs could literally get out of control and I'd have a 5-figure monthly bill with little recourse. I pulled out completely and shut it all down, after a few months had elapsed.

All in all, it was a good experiment, and really not disastrous; I did accomplish the learning of various cloud administration techniques, so I appreciated that. I don't miss the crazy opaque billing. There was so much more to learn. Perhaps someday.

A few notes:

- for personal or small stuff I'd recommend Lightsail instead of EC2.

- set budgets so that aws turns off your services if you go over.

- never expose your ssh port to the public internet. Lock it down with firewall rules from the outset. Lightsail does this by default.

- I'd still not use AWS if it was my money at stake. I have not screwed up yet, but it always feels possible.

- I've had to remediate at least one account whose app and architecture were incredibly poorly designed and were costing over $500k/pa when they should have been designed differently and cost no more than about $1k/pa (less again these days) for function, user load and security. AWS made those poor design decisions easy because those who built it could spin up anything and everything with no second thoughts.

Later I had a blog post answering some key questions about Agile on a different site. That post didn't get much attention, but it was a good exercise in articulating part of what I'm trying to convey when coaching software engineering teams. (https://blogs.harvard.edu/markshead/what-is-agile/)

After reworking the post into a concise PDF, I sent it to a few people at a potential client. Later, after I had been awarded a contract, I found that the PDF had gotten emailed around within the organization and many people knew me as the "guy who wrote that PDF about Agile."

I then took the contents of the PDF and reworked it as a script for an animation that I posted to YouTube. That video now has 2.7 million views and has given me quite a bit of recognition in the industry...or at least recognition of the cartoon version of me. I hear he is much better looking anyway. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9QbYZh1YXY)

I think took the general ideas from the blog post, the paper, and the video and put it together in a book that I generally give away like business cards to potential clients. (https://www.amazon.com/Starting-Agile-Finding-Your-Path/dp/1...)

The practice of writing on a blog has been key to my career, even though a lot of the benefits are a bit indirect and not something people would recognize from the outside.

I learnt about WordPress, HTML, basic CSS, and consistently wrote blog posts focused on tech in general (nothing technical - more along the lines of new gadgets, apps, useful software). Flash forward to being about to graduate and looking for jobs back home, I was asked to submit some work as proof of knowledge (this position wasn't necessarily geared to "entry-level", but at least I had something to demonstrate my limited experience). In my interviews, I was asked about this blog a lot - how it started, what I've done, my knowledge of SEO concepts and so on, and I strongly believe it's the main reason I was hired.

I really dislike how LinkedIn tries to get you to put your full CV online. Yeah, you don’t have to but it looks bad to have an empty LinkedIn profile.

The trigger for me to close my LinkedIn account was that my then boss asked why I had deleted my CV from LinkedIn. In a bullying tone that implied I had something to hide. Which wasn’t true, I simply never had posted the history of my job positions on LinkedIn because … I think that’s rather private info that I only share when I apply to new jobs. So there really is social pressure to share more than you want on LinkedIn.

That’s different with my personal website. There, I have full control over what impression I want to give to visitors and what information I want to share.

However, it has helped me as a space to write about the launch of my books, which probably yielded some sales and has allowed me to have some interesting discussions with people about the posts on occasion. It's also just cool to have people reading what you write.

On the other hand, I think creating a personal "who am I" website was helpful in a past job search as a point of reference for folks to learn about me and the job search went pretty well.[1]

0: https://www.observationalhazard.com 1: https://davekopec.com

My website has given me my entire career. I started a blog in 1999, not knowing a damn thing about servers or programming. Running a blog, or any website, was a challenge back in the 90s. I kept at it, learned how to program, got a job as a programmer during the first dot com boom. Kept at it and learned how to do sysadmin stuff. Started my own little web hosting company. Along the way had several decent professional jobs and always kept the blog and hosting going. I'm now a sysadmin at a small non profit. I shut down my own hosting thing in 2020. The site has become a bit quiet, but I still keep it running, it's just a part of my life I guess.

* I got to thank Rob here on HN one time a while back which was pretty cool.

Blogging is a waste of time. You see a website with 100 blog posts. That could easily be 1000 hours of work. And then if you ask such person if he/she gained something from it the answer will be of course. The relevant question should be - was it worth the effort? Could they have gotten the same thing with less effort in some other way?

When/if you are starting to blog you should make your goal clear. Are you blogging to get some money and side income? - there are better ways to achieve this. Are you blogging to advertise something? - there are better ways. Are you blogging for vanity and fame? - there are better ways. Are you blogging to create notes for your future self so you do not forget something? - there are better ways.

In my opinion there are very few goals where "having a blog" is the right answer.

It could also easily be 1,000 hours of learning.

> In my opinion there are very few goals where "having a blog" is the right answer.

Self improvement is one of the top reasons to have one, and while there are other ways to work towards that particular goal, it's an entirely valid approach.

You raise a definite point though, and when starting a blog you probably should carefully examine your reasons and expectations.

My blog has sections for articles and tutorials, even a section for documenting how broken a lot of the software out there is and I'd say that overall it's been a pleasant experience throughout the years. On one hand, it helps me jot down how to do certain things in a structured way, other times to practice expressing my views and experiences in a reasonably structured way and to just get better at writing.

I recall someone saying the following in a conference, which stuck with me (paraphrasing): "If you write something down and nobody ever reads it, those keypresses are sort of wasted."

So, I occasionally write. A lot of it is sub par but has resulted in a few job offers (which I admittedly didn't take at the time), or just nice e-mail conversations with other people. Here's a brief look at the blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/

As for personal sites, while I don't see myself having one of those super artistic portfolio sites that some lovely people out there do, I at least have a way of writing down some of the things that I've worked on over the years, my views, others' feedback and so on: https://kronis.dev/

Is it a super optimized and effective way at getting income, job interviews, clout or whatever people care about? Not really. Could someone call it a waste? Sure, but then again, a lot of the stuff we do as human beings is a bit of a waste when you think about it: watching shows or entertainment videos online, playing videos games, looking at memes, working on side projects that nobody will ever see and so on.

Sometimes it's nice to spend time on something that feels almost therapeutic in a way. Not everything needs to be perfect or optimized all the time, or even have a "right answer". The comfiness of it all actually reminds me of this article "An app can be a home-cooked meal": https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Only if you are looking at objective contribution to the world/conversation. What you don't see, and is not measurable by clicks or page-views or any other kind of real metric, is how you changed yourself by writing.

As others have notice, when you write something, your are practicing -- no, developing -- your writing and language skills and you are re-inforcing your understanding of the subject (why do you think teachers made you write essays at school/uni/college? Not so they can grade you, but so you learn).

Why not personal notes but a blog ? Coz I can link it to co-worker

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.

1. It lets me experiment with web tech. I redo my website every few years. Be it JS, CSS, static generated sites, etc. I usually find a theme I like and start modifying it to see how things work nowadays. Most recent attempt is to use that with a Golang and go:embed to make a self-contained blog in a binary.

2. Sometimes I just want to share knowledge or info. Might not be perfect, but its fun to get it out of my head instead of letting it stew. If it helps 1 person figure something out, it is a win. I recently had a coworker find my blog post on setting up Stable Diffusion on AMD through Hacker News by accident. He used it as a reference to get his own stuff working for a less than perfect setup.

3. I once posted one of my posts on here. It surprisingly went well, and had some good discussion on it. So that is fun. But I am of the mindset that I don't want to post my own articles (as their own HN posts, I am fine with linking to things in comments on occasion). They should show up on HN naturally if they are useful to someone enough to get posted. I also fear them getting ripped to shreds (probably some form of imposter syndrome) by HN readers.

Three months later: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/11/pm-apology-to-...

My blog is a lot of personal updates, technical things I'm learning/wanting to teach, and updates on my projects.

It helps me realize that even one post a month is enough to keep track of something.

My blog isn't very popular mainly b/c I don't market it anywhere, it's mostly used to reference things I've done in the past and quickly find information.

Last year, I started working on a project called BoardSearch (https://boardsearch.io) and right around that time my interest in mechanical keyboards was at a peak so it helped me share thoughts about building the website and also about keyboards I was interested in. This led to getting a bunch of organic search visits and now I'm doing 500-1000 views without any new content about keyboards most of the time.

http://mirtitles.org

This blog though does not generate any revenue, I see it as a personal achievement which will perhaps be my contribution to the world at large which might be remembered or make an impact. The vision of the blog started from the idea to preserve knowledge which might be otherwise lost/forgotten. This blog was/is the guiding light for me in my dark times.

Sometimes I write about things I want people know about Taiwan like their bike-sharing system[2], semiconductors[3], or simply good food in Taiwan[4].

Sometimes, I write about tech stuff, like kubernetes cpu limits[5] or blockchain consensus[6].

I thought about focusing in a single topic, but when people reaches me out, like today[7] about my food post, it reminds me that it is fine, and make me quite happy that I helped one soul out there.

[1] https://erickhun.com/posts/volleyball-and-beach-volleyball-i...

[2] https://erickhun.com/posts/taiwan-youbike-bike-sharing/

[3] https://erickhun.com/posts/world-innovation-taiwan-semicondu...

[4] https://erickhun.com/posts/taipei-restaurants/

[5] https://erickhun.com/posts/kubernetes-faster-services-no-cpu...

[6] https://erickhun.com/posts/explaining-blockchains-to-develop...

[7] https://imgur.com/a/m06CQYd

Although the topic of coffee / coffee shops is niche, writing about the places I visit, I am able to touch upon my diverse set of interests (art, photography, technology, design, reading, writing, general curation, psychology, philosophy, history, etc.)

In the pre-facebook days it helped me locate some old friends I'd lost track of.

The closest I've come to fame was when a local TV station interviewed me as "the expert" on an obscure subject because my web site was the first google search result.

Second most often realized benefit is forcing projects to actually get completed. Unless something is clearly a multipart adventure, I try to force myself to actually finish the thing before writing it up. I enjoy writing things up and documenting them, so it's a motivator. I've also decided to put things on my site first, rather than bite-size entertainment-for-others posts on various sites.

As others have said, it definitely has helped with interviews, though I haven't had to do one in a while.

Not sure of whether that experience is transferable in the current landscape. It also didn't hurt that I was already living in SF.

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/

https://fredlybrand.com/2018/10/15/goldratts-the-goal-chapte...

The counts are low for the blog posts and the video views, but what does come in is a qualified lead who already wants to do something interesting.

I'd have a website even if it provided none of the above. Think about how good it feels to have a deep conversation with someone on a topic you love. That's what it feels like to write for my website. And in 2023, the cost is basically zero.

Then in 2015, I had some serious Hackaday envy and so I started another WordPress blog[1] to document my hobby-engineering-related stuff. That took a turn toward amateur radio. I did some fun projects, got a bit of a following.

In August 2021, I actually got to start writing for Hackaday.com, much in part due to the experience/voice that I'd created when writing for my blogs.

I also used that experience/voice to do some writing-for-hire stuff at a well known site for low-end VPSs, and that experience got me in contact with people that landed me my current job, which is the most fantastic job I've ever had.

[0] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/17/180242/surviving-th...

[1] https://miscdotgeek.com

First of all, it's a nice hobby. No bullshit programming, no frameworks, no dependencies, no annoying editors. I just write my code and text and enjoy doing so.

Second, it gives powerful motivation to study. I'm now writing a new page on rational interpolation and just yesterday I accidentally found a very simple way to avoid the Runge effect. I was just playing with interactives and it came out of the blue. There is no way I would have learned it otherwise.

Third, it helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning. They came to me and proposed to propose them a book on geometry. And so I did. The book is called Geometry for Programmers and it's coming this summer.

Fourth, I do public lectures (or at least I used to before the war), and the audience loves interactive illustrations. So I usually turn my site pages into presentation-like pages and do lectures with them.

So for me, having a website pays off in multiple ways.

A lot of it is what you want to be doing though. I like to talk, teach, communicate, advise and coach. Blogging let's me get that across and I think it helps there. I don't know that it would make much difference for pure coding positions though. I have gotten a few offers to do paid blogging, but I really just don't have the time. One post I wrote for Codeship years ago that got picked up here was a compilation of about a years worth of research and experience to compare Elixir and Go.

Definitely increases learning though. One of my teachers in high school told me, "If you really want to learn something, teach it." It's true. In order to publish something or give a talk on it, I go much deeper than I would have for my own uses.

Ego certainly plays a part. I'm much more motivated to keep writing when I'm getting positive feedback on it. Got picked up by HN several times and learned a lot from the conversations, which was great. Brian Krebs retweeted me once, which motivated me to write a 6 part security series* that never got the same level of traction.

Biggest issue for me is that I'm a long form, detailed writer. I know if I actually care about using this stuff for marketing then I'll need to slice the posts into bite sized chunks. Since I mostly write this stuff just to get it to stop bouncing around in my head, I stick with the long form way.

* - https://www.brightball.com/articles/the-time-i-accidentally-...

Additionally, the company related to my field (Oracle) invited me into their “knowledge sharing” program. This helps meeting other people and at most conferences, they invite us to dinner, which is nice.

Besides, people telling me how a blog post helped them achieve something makes me happy and proud.

Doing OSS on Github or Tweeting leads to more business opportunities in my mind.

My blog, https://hammyhavoc.com acts as a portfolio of what I've done. I started keeping a 'Now page' (https://hammyhavoc.com/now/) instead of posting on social media, it's much more detailed and interesting.

People find my blog via Google et al via a lot of relevant search queries, and I've picked up a fair bit of work through it passively. I could probably blog a lot more, but I've realized that I've been inadvertently writing a non-fiction book about technology for the past decade, so a lot of posts just end up as fodder for that.

- Got me jobs. I'd estimate more than half of the significant jobs I've had in my life came about through relationships that had originated with people getting to know my work through my blog.

- Speaking engagements. I used my blog to bootstrap a bunch of these, to the point that I've spoken at well over 100 events.

- Invitations to interesting meetings. Most recently, my writing about AI has gotten me invited to some really interesting in-person meetups in the Bay Area.

- Media appearances! I've been on radio and TV a few times now thanks to things I've written on my own blog.

It's also just really rewarding to have somewhere I can post content that entirely belongs to me.

I posted this when I hit the 20 year mark with a whole bunch of highlights: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Jun/12/twenty-years/

But, people _have_ actually read it, which is nice. I've hired at least one person through my blog (he emailed me after reading it), and he was awesome to work with. A lot of coworkers have messaged me saying "hey, I was googling for this problem I'm having, and I found your blog, and I realized you work at the company, so thank you!" I've benefited so much from reading developer blogs throughout my career, so it's nice to be able to give back and help others too.

I think it's helped me get better at technical writing and show employers that I can do more than just write code too.

It started slow -- before I even became an engineer. As I grew as a software engineer, I started to set aside time specifically to write a post. At peak, I was spending ~50h per month writing one technical post. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It helped improve my thinking and writing skills. Over time, it became harder for me to find the time (and content/ideas) so I've essentially stopped adding new posts. I keep the site up since it doesn't cost me anything beyond the domain name.

I don't have any analytics, so I have no idea how many visitors I get. Cloudflare does tell me that they saved me GBs of bandwidth every month and mitigated ~10 "events", so I'm guessing there's at least a handful of people and hundreds of bots -- hopefully enjoying the content.

[1] https://www.quaxio.com/

Initially free, the blog eventually became paid and grew into a very active WhatsApp group of over 700+ members.

This week, something that started as a personal blog is evolving into a product for me.

The blog helped me in many ways: - Increased learning by actively looking for newer topics and exploring more about them

- After having a few users it put pressure and discipline to blog daily

- Led to many interesting conversations and connections

- Give lots of innovative ideas and a boost of confidence

- There are lots of learning on entrepreneurship as well

For those who might be interested, I maintain it here: http://everydayseries.com/blog/

Back in the days of yore when I did it this put you ahead of 50-60% of new graduates. It's less now, but I review internship applications and a good 30% still give me nothing tangible I can look at.

So if you happen to be in the 30%, the best thing you can do (and it's so quick) is to put anything at all related to your professional development online. Go through a tutorial, post the results, and briefly write up your thoughts on it.

Congratulations, you just skipped 30% of the line for your first job in an evening of work.

I also have a "portfolio" site, and I am in a career path where none of my peers have a portfolio site. There I show off my technical expertise in a handful of software packages that are crucial to my career. The domain name is a technical name about these software packages.

Last year I concluded a successful job search and landed a very good job at a very good company. I used my personal website domain name as my contact, and highlighted my portfolio site in my resume to back-up my experience and expertise.

It was often a topic during my interviews.

These days I am studying Data Analytics / Data Science (and now ChatGPT/ML too) in order to augment my skillset and possibly make a career pivot. I have taken a very short very good domain name about data and I have started to blog about my perspective of Data Analytics/Data Science from my present career track (they kind of intersect / overlap a bit), documenting my learning progresses, collecting resources etc... this actually has landed me 1 interview at a great company without applying (the recruiter saw my LinedIn profile and this site); but the job was way above my head, but it was a good experience.

I advice everyone who asks me for job hunting advice the same: don't job hunt, build a career, and also build an online presence and a portfolio. I am no good at helping people getting a job in 30 days or less, but I am very good at coaching people in getting a great job 5-10 years down the line, if they start now.

Moreover, writing every day (I do that on my own Google Docs), helps think better; better thinking leads to better problem solving; which leads to better writing.

And then ChatGPT came along, and it's changing everything by augmenting people's capabilities.

Stay tuned.

2) Other people have found my blog posts useful, for the same reason as 1, and have told me so.

3) As an indie developer, my blog has been helpful in promoting my own software.

1. Got my break in the tech industry thanks to a blog post on some reverse engineering tinkering I've been doing.

2. On multiple occasions, I ended up searching online for a problem only to land on a blog post I wrote years ago, so I use it as my own reference every once in a while.

3. Connected to a network of folks in the companies I've worked at (and continue to work in) thanks to blog posts where I tinker with APIs and all sorts of random stuff ("Oh yeah - I've seen that blog post before.") that I wouldn't run into otherwise.

4. Got way better at writing and expressing my thoughts clearly, especially when it comes to more technical topics, thanks to having a public forcing function.

I haven't actively tried to monetize it (though I'd like to shift to income based on my own work rather than be tied to a company). I tried putting ads once in a while and it was ~decent but negligible, and kind of ruined the vibe. I have done a few one-off consulting things out of it and got some nice side-cash, but nothing meaningful.

What I do get is feeling engaged with the wider tech community. Seeing common questions and comments. A feeling that what I'm saying might resonate with some people. Interesting discussions on Twitter and HN. A few podcast invites, etc.

I use my blog as a personal wiki and notebook, and have well over 20 years of content in there (check out this page link graph: https://taoofmac.com/static/graph), so I invariably end up posting stuff that is useful to me as reference, and that kind of feedback loop definitely helps with learning (or at least keeping track of) things.

I've interviewed for several lead/manager roles and virtually all interviewers have brought up that they really like my ManagerREADME and it gave them great additional insight to me as a candidate. In another case, this document was the reason a company reached back out to me for an additional manager role they created after having originally passed on me for a candidate with more relevant work experience.

Overall, I'm quite proud of my creation and it's had direct benefit in advancing my career.

Link intentionally omitted.

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess#White's_a...,

> It has been argued that two games should be played from each starting position, with players alternating colors, since the advantage offered to White in some initial positions may be greater than in classical chess. However, ..... on average a Fischer Random starting position is 22.2% less unbalanced than the standard starting position.

Here's a Reddit post from October 2022 (https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/yeregq/fischer_rando...) that states the following:

> Mean centipawn advantage for white - 36.82 Standard deviation - 13.79 Most "unfair" positions with +0.79 advantage

If I am interpreting your diagram correctly, it appears that Fischer Random Chess provides more balanced positions.

> positions where the engine may consider the position to be almost equal, but it could be objectively worse for one of the players

That is a good point, centipawns aren't the best metric for the subjective experience of playing. Engines are really good at defending, finding the "only move" defense where a human will struggle. And the mental work of finding "only moves" is pretty taxing. If you put someone under that kind of pressure for long enough, they will break.

The analysis is also flawed because it doesn't take into account the fact that the opponent is also playing a word. If I know that my opponent must play a "G" move on his next turn, I should play a move to take advantage of that fact. Stockfish's game tree is not eliminating impossible moves and will tend to overrate the opponent's position.

(As a concrete example, suppose I can make a move M1 where the opponent's only move to not lose immediately is an F move, but if the opponent plays it they are at an advantage. In this situation the opponent must play a G move, a fact which a human might be able to guess. Stockfish will not play M1, but instead play a different move M2 that at least maintains equality. So the stockfish evaluation is pretty flawed.)

Most middle managers will not hire someone with a fledging YouTube channel or a popular blog or a weaponisable Twitter following unless the role is a public facing PR role (devrel etc).

The thing is, there is no way to know about or count the lost opportunities. Grey man strategy (i.e. not early 2000s "build a personal brand" strategy) is safest for most people.