When thoughtful technical writing could lead to speaking gigs, job offers, and meaningful connections?
But in 2025, the landscape has shifted dramatically:
- LinkedIn's algorithmic feed heavily favors short-form "broetry" over substantive technical content - Twitter/X has become a battleground of AI-generated hot takes - Medium is drowning in SEO-optimized tutorials that all say the same thing
Unless you're already established or willing to play the AI-SEO game, it feels impossible to build genuine readership for a technical blog in 2025.
Yet part of me wonders if I'm just being cynical. Maybe there's still value in writing for its own sake? Or perhaps there are distribution channels I haven't considered?
For those still maintaining personal blogs: How do you find readers? Where do you share your content? And most importantly - why do you keep writing?
You can establish yourself as something of a global expert on some topic just by writing about it a few times a month over the course of a year!
Don't expect people to come to your blog. Practice https://indieweb.org/POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - post things on your blog and then tweet/toot/linkedin/submit-to-hacker-news/share-in-discord etc.
Also, don't worry too much about whether you get traffic at the time you write something. A lot of the reputational value comes from having written something that you can link people to in the future. "Here are my notes about that topic from last year: LINK" - that kind of thing.
There's a lot to be said for writing for its own sake, too. Just writing about a topic forces you to double-check your understanding and do a little bit more research. It's a fantastic way of learning more about the world even if nobody else ever reads it.
I don't have a blog, but I POSSE by keeping stuff I write in Obsidian.
The internet is a circular loop of "engagement", the same crap comes up everywhere. People as recommendations for the same stuff, argue about the same things.
I got tired of rewriting the same thing from memory so now I have it pre-written (And sourced in some cases) in Obsidian. I can just copy-paste from there with minor modifications and updates and spend less energy in shooting down the most common misconceptions.
Might turn it into a blog later, but I've tried it a few times and I always end up bikeshedding about blog engines and themes and deployment :D
https://g9h.io/write-your-own-static-site-generator.html
In short, when you are blogging you are actually writing for yourself. If other folks find it useful/interesting/amusing, that's gravy.
I quit writing a while ago, but resumed in 2025 after reading your excellent series of posts on AI topics
I hope I can keep learning to be able write with the clarity and depth that you do
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This is such a wise and golden advice
The Apple store and Epson told them to do a clean install so they were very grateful and it made me happy that I could help them. Worth it for me!
In the ye olden days people just blogged about stuff they found interesting. If nobody read it, it was still out there for someone to find. I can remember multiple times where finding some obscure blog helped me debug an issue I had.
Now it's all hidden in Reddit or even worse in TikTok or Youtube videos that won't get indexed properly.
In today's world of global economic depression, everybody is fucking bloodshot eyed desperate to make enough money to have a roof over their head. So if they have time and energy to make a quality blog, it means they are scraping by financially and need to monetize ASAP. And if they are employed it means they don't have the time or energy left when they're at home to make a quality blog.
If you want thousands of people reading it, probably not. If you just want it there for posterity, I would say yes. In that case maybe see if it is in the wayback machine.
I have moved my site to gemini with a gopher mirror, I find that far easier to maintain and I do not really care who or if anyone sees it :)
Other "worth it" could be the development of your writing skills, documenting own learning path and so on. Maybe something can be even useful for you as well later on.
If you think "worth it" as a way to get attention, get job offers automatically e.g., likely not worth it unless it gets HN front page.
I do mention my blog on my resume together with code repositories. It is some kind of portfolio, and it is a good learning experience for me.
I don't think that it is worth "building a brand", unless you want to specialize in building brands. It's not like someone at Google will ever read your blog and offer you a job; if you want to work at Google, learn how to pass their interview process. If you want to be visible on social media, probably you need to follow a ton of people, engage with them, produce a lot of content and the kind of content that people like or repost. This has nothing to do with a personal blog, though.
Another thing is that if you find it worth blogging about, it's probably niche in the first place. If it's common knowledge, it's probably already on Wikipedia, or StackOverflow, or now some LLM (and if you wait long enough, your blog will be part of the LLM, whether you want it or not).
I see it like FOSS: if you do it with the hope that many people will use it, then I think it's a bad idea. Because you work for free and people will never be happy. If you do it for yourself, it's great!
My blog literally had that effect from Google, many years ago -- although obviously I still had to go through the interview process. And my blog definitely helped me land my past and current jobs as recently as 2 years ago.
So they did not exactly offer you a job, did they? Say you had applied spontaneously without this first contact, would it have been different?
I have had multiple people tell me that they got "recruited" by a FAANG. And when I ask details, what happened is more that some recruiter "convinced" them to apply and go through the interview process. So they did not really get offered a job: they applied and went through the process. I get a ton of messages on LinkedIn from all sorts of recruiters...
> And my blog definitely helped me land my past and current jobs
Was it because the companies discovered you through your blog? Or did you apply and put your blog on your resume as a portfolio?
My point is: I think that a blog is part of your portfolio, and I agree it may help when applying for a job. But I don't believe in "building a personal brand" such that a company magically offers you a job.
I keep writing (https://taoofmac.com) because:
a) my wiki (looks like a blog, but it is a wiki, roughly 9500 pages of it these days - https://taoofmac.com/static/graph) is a public notepad of sorts, and I often do stuff that is either unique enough to not be documented anywhere or of interest to some technical fields (so many people found me because Google search used to work).
b) I refer to my notes frequently and share them, and it helps if they can be made public, especially when dealing with customers.
c) writing is sort of what I do. I like it, and it greatly benefits my ability to recall things. Every engineer on the planet should know how to write and communicate effectively, simply because explaining things always improves your ability to reason about problems.
That said, it's kind of weird to search for something I need to fix and come across my old self from 5-10 years ago.
That’s not saying writing isn’t important. I don’t think I understand a subject unless I can teach it, explain it and argue both sides about why you should and shouldn’t use it.
If I were going to go into independent consulting as oppose to working for consulting companies, I might start a blog a year ahead of time. But it wouldn’t be for discovery. Leveraging and improving my network would be the first strategy and then direct people to it once they knew me.
this is 100% why I write "courses" alongside my notes when learning something- forces you to think about pitfalls you fall into while learning, things you need to revisit and an overall story on how to introduce a topic.
but blogging? Outside of an immediate personal sphere I don't really see the need. Although that said I'm looking at things like [pico.sh](https://pico.sh/prose) just to play around with presentable notes/courses rather than my default obsidian stuff.
I love keeping a blog as my own private journal. I wouldn't want it public though because I can keep it as unstructured/messy as I want with it being private. Mostly a collection or random notes / thoughts / code that I wouldn't want a potential employer to get an impression of me from.
It has huge value to me. The value of reading someone else blog at this point is basically zero to me. Mostly throw away, surface level articles for branding and networking purposes but if that is the dance you are trying to learn then it makes sense.
I don’t have ads, affiliate links nor do I care about traffic or have any analytics. I doubt that it gets any real traffic. By keeping it public, the only benefit I see is that it encourages me to at least care about my writing. It’s just my spot on the internet.
https://digitalnomadder.micro.blog/
You almost have to have a mailing list, which is problematic on its own.
Then, what’s the ultimate goal? Ads (ughh)? Paid subscriptions? Becoming known as an industry expert?
If I had to start over, I would certainly do it again.
Shameless plug: http://rickcarlino.com
I try to limit my contact routes to as few as possible so I don't have to process so many interruptions.
I have a twitter link on my website, so that may cater for people who don't use email any more :)
I wouldn't consider Twitter a replacement for email, though. The one thing about email is that everyone must have one. It's the one common denominator, and I believe it is the reason why email is still a thing.
Twitter, on the other hand... I mean just the fact that you apparently refuse to use the new name says a thing or two about what you think about it, right?
I have a link aggregator (Bento.me) that points to my blog, GitHub, cool projects to get involved with, etc. I feel like this also shows a level of enthusiasm / involvement with the field / community as a whole as well.
I saw your other comment and also agree with the email exclusion. My blog has the ability to have comments, my GitHub has open repos, and there is a calendar link. If someone wants to dig for my email they can (as it's very public at this point lol), but I'd prefer it not be the main route I handle online comms through from people reaching that link agg.
As for the how: same as always, I think. Write content because you want to do it, then share it through places where you know potential readers are (HN, Bluesky, your friends, etc)
I know that people are also using Substack and similar platforms as they can help with both distribution and marketing, but I know less about that.
Molly White has written about why one should blog, but I can't find the exact piece of writing, so here's a podcast with her instead: https://about.flipboard.com/inside-flipboard/molly-white/