I see it’s common for people on HN to have a personal website/blog. I’m interested in knowing if the creation and maintenance of a personal website have lead to paid full/part time jobs, increased learning, brought new connections to others or are purely vanity.
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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.
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!
Sure Cave Murder Tour Guide, sure
When it rains, no drains.
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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"
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.
(Maybe the trick is: if you must tinker, also turn that tinkering into writing?)
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.
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?"
I'll figure out something, I'm sure.
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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?
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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-...
[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.