1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
About point 2: I have yet to have a job interview, in which the interviewer has even taken a look at my website. Well, actually I don't know that, of course, but what I want to say is, that none so far showed any sign or indication of having taken a look, and as a consequence also no sign or indication of knowing anything about any of my showcased projects. In 95% of the cases it was just that they want to do their one thing, their one test, and not consider the candidate as a person at all. No time for that these days, I guess.
Also a hiring manager. I always do. For me a good personal site is a huge step towards a phone interview. I look for things people do not because anyone told them to do (college projects, internships, work), but because they were excited about it. That initiative and excitement is what will set you apart from the other 100 resumes that look exactly like yours.
That's wild. I first typically LinkedIn search someone, and then web search someone, even before I get too deep into the resume (they've already been filtered and ranked for me).
In the past I got a job I had for 8 years through my blog, a startup that eventually sold....
So, it's been pretty good for me, and doesn't actually take that much extra effort on top of the learning you do daily working in tech.
Depends on the company type. Seems like FAANG and companies trying to act like FAANG just follow a strict formulaic process and your portfolio or blog is kinda irrelevant there.
For startups and small companies I think it makes a huge difference.
At one job I was told explicitly I was hired mostly because the hiring manager liked my website - I wasn't the only one that passed the interview process and so my website was why I was chosen. He liked how minimalist it was.
At another, one of the engineers found a bug on my website and my interview was to pair program a fix with him.
When I'm in charge of hiring I strongly prefer candidates that have some kind of web presence that lets me structure the interview more towards what they've presented about themselves.
Also I have gotten clients that originally found me because they googled "how to rent a motorcycle in Taiwan" and I rank #1 for that search apparently.
I'm involved in screening CVs and interviewing candidates. If there is so much as a email adress that indicates a personal domain, I look it up to see whether behind it there might be something like a personal website. When the CV is good and Github repositories etc. are mentioned I also take a brief glance there. But indeed, it is very rather rare that I make the content a part of the interview.
As a senior I'm doing tech part of interviews sometimes. If there is a link to blog/gh/whatever in CV - I always check it. I may not say anything during interview, but I'm looking there.
But… having (not so often updated) blog myself - I will try to change my behavior in future and mention it somehow during interview ;)
You likely are interviewing at big companies. I have worked across the industry and the smaller the team the more they look at my website work etc. some even asked about game reviews on my blog during the interview.
However, even at big companies it can be useful depending on context but you have to bring it up in relation to why you are a fit for the job. Genuine enthusiasm goes a long way especially in the dry corporate world.
I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?”
Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.
"[...] write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived."
How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.
And it's very easy to start with something that is also "social":
- https://write.as - a https://writefreely.org instance that also syncs with Mastodon, so people can see/discover/subscribe/ comment on your posts without extra hassle of setting up comments or other privacy invading tools.
This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge the details.
I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.
You are mostly right. But I suspect that a good writer will remain good [or even better] with LLM's. In my experience the bad ones are detected immediately.
Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.
I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up.
I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't write about anything that someone else with much deeper expertise hasn't already written about.
That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years. It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly “important” to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or because you want to share what you've made with others in the hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback, seems to be fading away.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
This post really resonates with me, especially points 1, 3, and 5.
I started blogging in 2001. I have old articles lying around that are completely obsolete - about PEAR, Swing, GWT, Subversion, etc.
I did it to share without having any idea who was reading or not. Probably nobody back then.
But it became a habit. Beyond tech topics, I started blogging about broader subjects: organization, hiring, salaries, company building.
And it's incredible how much I relied on it later as a sort of documentation, especially for everything related to company building. It's so valuable to re-read why we made certain decisions in the past. And it's also so valuable to be able to point new colleagues to that knowledge base.
And technically, I had fun. I went through Joomla, self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com. I built my own plugins. Then I developed my own open source static blog generator (bloggrify.com) in the Nuxt ecosystem. That's when I created an English version of my blog.
Then I started feeling the need to share differently. I had the impression that blogging was becoming outdated, that younger generations weren't reading anymore. So I tried video format on YouTube.
I really enjoyed video production - there's still so much to learn: equipment, techniques, new tools.
But I realized that each format has its pros and cons. It's so much easier to update text when it becomes obsolete. It's also so much faster to produce. Video is so hard to make.
So I got back into writing and even took it further by creating a blogging platform (writizzy.com).
In short, I learned a lot because I documented everything I did, which forced me to dig deeper into each topic to avoid saying nonsense.
I also learned a lot because I wanted to test approaches, make videos, learn to build a static site generator and many other things, purely for the sake of learning.
Today, one piece of advice I give to every senior dev is to take the time to write. Doesn't matter if it's to publish somewhere or not. But to lay out your ideas, dig deeper into them, get perspective.
>1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
>3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
These are generally why I blog. I write the articles with an audience in mind, because I don't know a concept if I can't explain it cogently. And also I actually tend to refer back to my blog for my own reference surprisingly regularly. For example, I wrote an article on installing Debian on a PC Engines APU over the serial interface, and then getting the Unifi Controller running. Every so often when I update the Debian install on that box, or decide to change OSes on a different APU I'll refer to that article.
You wouldn't think that that would be so difficult but it was a surprisingly baroque process.
> If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years
Oh hey, that's me! This post might actually encourage me to get back on top of things. Not only do I have two articles (more recent than 5 years though), one of them has a glaring error that is somewhat foundational to what it's supposed to be about. I have to fix that, as well as my broken RSS feed, and get my git link re-directed to my self-hosted forge, and update all my remotes, remove some defunct links and menu options, and then decide which of my 68 (yes, 68!) blog drafts I want to focus on publishing next. Now that I've listed it out, I bet I can get all that done over the break.
I make a point of hitting "publish" when I'm still not entirely happy with what I've written, because I know that the alternative is a folder full of drafts and nothing published at all.
Nobody who reads your stuff will ever know how good it could have been if you kept on polishing it.
My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn’t a huge fan. It gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it posts to the blog. Right now it’s just one long running page (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I’m debating between adding an archive or just only showing a certain number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed based on the markdown files, so they just works without any fuss.
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
Believe it or not, Blogger still exists and is free. I did some research when I was looking to spin up a blog for professional purposes. I ended up just rolling it into my personal blog though, for various reasons, I haven't done a lot with it yet. Project for the new year.
You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple, adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more advanced use cases.
In Digital Ocean you can host up to 3 static sites for free, includes HTTPS, your own domain names and automatic deployment from GitHub repos. Look for their "app platform"
You could publish it as an onion service! Apart from keeping your computer running and an active internet connection, there isn't any other recurring cost.
GitHub Pages gives you a neat URL - yourname.github.io - and is free forever and even lets you run GitHub Actions for free to operate a static site builder.
I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that".
My old blog posts come up in the first page of search results for niche topics a lot, and it is very satisfying when someone reaches out to say that they benefited from it.
On a side note, after writing frequently for ~12 years, I didn't write anything for the next 6. This discussion came at the right time - it nudged me to publish two posts yesterday.
What are people using to edit entries - because while markdown is fine, a lot of the time I want to be able to drag in screenshots, snippets of other documents like rfcs and so on. So it ends up being easier to make those notes for myself rather than push them into anything publishable.
> 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
ugh, I hate this. Often when doing a search for how to do something I get 100 beginner blogs that cover the absolute basics but have no depth. People who know what they're doing are drowned out.
Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0 and gopher …
I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
The only time I used AI for writing was when I was cleaning up some reference architectures and needed some fairly boilerplate text for the intro background. But basically don't really use AI; maybe if I did more coding these days.
I started following your blog when you were like, 14. Cool to see you here. I've kept up my blog for 25 years, and you were an inspiration along the way.
The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people.
I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my readers to subscribe to things.
Then I tried substack but they lean too heavily on the "newsletter" paradigm which I hate. Also they are starting to enshittify now too.
I don't mind paying for a service but they always want to double dip in tracking readers and selling subscriptions to them as well. Yuck.
This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.
There are just not enough ways to discover personal blogs.
HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.
If you blog I think it's really important to develop a habit of linking to other people's blogs. That's how blog discovery used to work back in the 200xs and it can still work effectively today.
If you mean creating a blogroll to show other blogs you recommend, that is no longer so effective now that mobile phones are most of the world’s default interface to the internet. Themes for common blogging platforms like Wordpress generally hide the sidebar, blogrolls included, on mobile.
Out of curiosity, I see my website not being well indexed and I wondered whether it is because I include
```
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
```
in my robots.txt. What should one add to allow Marginalia to crawl their website?
I built Scour to help me sift through noisy sources like HN Newest. For each article in my Scour feed, I can click the Show Feeds button to find what other sources that post shows up in. I’ve found that to be quite a nice way of discovering people’s blogs that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
While we are here, may I ask what are some blogs you guys read regularly? (Regularly as in: going back to read new articles as opposed to a one-off link shared on some other platform.)
Cloudhiker is pretty healthy as a StumbleUpon revival. I've found lots of great personal blogs and sites across a lot of categories through it. https://cloudhiker.net/
I really wish someone came up with an reddit alternative - perhaps stick to STEM + lifestyle topics only to keep things free of national/international politics - and thus free of interference/censorship.
There are so many benefits around having a personal blog that I'm surprised about reading all these negative comments.
I started blogging about tech and security when I was 13/14 years old in my native language. Then, when I felt more mature, I switched to a new blog where English was the main language. I started improving my language skills, getting some donation from kind strangers for my blog posts and using it as a self-branding forever running-side project.
Now, 20 years later I still have my personal blog and I still write about tech, but only recently I created some "personal related" tabs, like the "/now" page, enriching it every month or having a more personal about page. Why? Because I like going to a blog a see that behind that address there is a real person with emotions and dreams, it's like entering in their home and have a look around.
1. Improve your language skills
2. Self-branding
3. Memorize better topics you care about
4. Share what you learned with others
About LLM, I don't care if they scrape my blog, I use LLMs every day, and if some stuff I write helps to enrich an LLM with a positive impact I would be more than happy to let it happens, the more we write, the less fake-news and low-quality content would ingest and used.
I recall when I entered college. The first thing was mandatory, required, english classes.
The logic was, if you cannot communicate, you cannot explain why your job, or what you're doing is important. If it has value. If you have value. You cannot hope to explain requirements to others. Or explain the logic or reasons, the "why" of a technical path.
You're likely correct that a lot of people think this unimportant. To them I'd say, they're severely limiting their career, if they don't think communicating is important.
That's really interesting to me. I consider writing to be a "raw technical skill." Programming and writing are inextricably linked. The lexicon of software borrows heavily from writing: language, syntax, grammar, statement, and expression. Even the way we critique code heavily overlaps with how an editor critiques writing: consistent, readable, elegant, concise or verbose, and follows a style guide.
Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites.
The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.
The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
Will an LLM purposefully change facts to incorrect information without fighting you the entire way? Seems like a blog platform could offer a feature where every posts has 3 or 4 factually wrong posts that would only be found by scrapers.
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.
One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
It was about sharing bits of your daily life and personal thoughts and feelings, while building a small community. Having more than 50-100 readers was a major event (and not a thing people aimed for).
Yes indeed, and also the title promise - I looked forward to read how the personal blogs are back, only to discover the author didnt provide any evidence, but not even examples. Maybe they are indeed back, if we count Substack newsletter archive as a "personal blog".
I've released a new post every week for 10 years straight.
My traffic in the last 2 years is worse than the first 2 years. At the blog's peak I was getting around 180k unique visitors a month for years.
I was able to build a whole business around selling tech courses and doing contract work for the last 10 years but now traffic is so little that this is no longer feasible (not even close).
Just looking at the numbers, it's very likely related to Google not sending as much traffic as they used to because they either inline my content on their search engine results or AI results are used now instead of people visiting individual sites.
I still do it because I enjoy the process and my main motivator was never money but at the same time you need to be able to sustain yourself too. It's a bummer to be honest.
On that note, a ton of great non-money related opportunities came my way due to posts I've written in the past so I won't be stopping. I hope these continue.
> The idea of personal blogging is for your own growth and history.
That was why I started. Any business I got were byproducts of writing organically about the things I was working on. Courses were also a byproduct of doing the same type of contract work for many different clients.
the problem I always have with starting a personal blog is that-I want to write about my projects, but I also want to write about introspective life things. And I'm always fearful that introspective life things would detract (perhaps significantly, if they are too revealing) from employers/etc looking at me as a potential hire. This is not so much about politics (I don't find a strident need to blog about my political opinions (yet?)), but just writing about friends, life events, what I thinka bout those, etc.
I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal, make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it, though.)
2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
I mostly post tech things, but at some point I wanted to share a few thoughts about a touchy subject like dating. I had the same dilemma - the last thing I wanted was for it to backfire professionally. At that time I was a consultant and freelancer, so looking for a job wasn’t something I did every few years, but more on a continuous basis.
My girlfriend back then encouraged me to post under my name, as long as I was comfortable being asked about it and defending my words (I was, so I did).
The reception from friends was positive. To my surprise, it had a neutral to mildly positive professional impact, "this is a tech guy, but he has soft skills".
And as you can see, there are quite a few posts like that (side ideas, physical and mental health, relationships).
---
Of course, your mileage may vary. Tech is one thing, but for many jobs (especially government, public service, primary education) it might be different.
It also depends on the general norms within a country—what’s taboo, and how far you’re willing to cross it.
At the same time, when I’ve heard of someone being rejected due to their online presence, it was mostly not about the views themselves, but about how they were expressed. Raging hate might be off-putting—even to those who share a similar bias.
My two cents: if you're not doing anything too political or controversial, it's fine or even beneficial to mix in the occasional personal essay with the professional.
After all, many of your readers are also human beings with lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up to.
> I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead.
That's the route I decided to choose when I started my professional career.
I already had a personal (pseudonymous) blog.
And that's where I put the stuff around work.
I decided to go this way for many reasons.
First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.
Second, because I want to share things for free and to help others first, not to help myself/my career.
Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media, I would focus on things that would help my career, not on things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else.
So it would BE work.
And it would only take a few months before I would be tired of it.
Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.
Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about how or what or when I should write about anything.
If you're working as an individual contributor, I'm sure it can matter, but usually doesn't. It's widely accepted that people have personal opinions and politics, and that it can even extend to not liking some of the decisions made by the company you're applying to. There are workplaces that might screen for ideological purity, but it's rare. Both because it's illegal and because hiring is hard even without additional self-imposed constraints.
I think the only thing that can derail a job application is if your personal blog makes you look patently unreasonable, either by supporting causes that are socially unacceptable ("it's OK to hit women") or getting way too angry over mundane stuff ("everyone working at Microsoft should be shot"). But if you just happen to have an opinion about a politician, whatever.
Where it gets dicey is if you're in a leadership position, especially director and above. Then, you're sort of paid to keep your opinions to yourself, because when you have an organization of 100 people or more, at least several will disagree with your politics and will then judge your actions through that prism, leading to drama and possible HR fights.
I don't feel like I've had any negative impact from that, or I'm very privileged to be able to say I don't care if I have had any impact from that - I've done fairly well for myself, and I can remind people I'm a full human being!
I have done the second way. I have split it up in categories, so people can subscribe to different categories rss feeds if they don't want the whole feed. I have ~1000 daily readers now. With all kinds of interests.
I feel similarly. Sometimes I feel like spinning up an anonymous account on bearblog.dev or matatora.blog where I can write freely without any hassle. For now, though, I have a microblog section as a secondary stream that mixes tech with low-stakes, personal, non-tech bits (music, pictures, showerthoughts, etc).
Two years ago I started a niche blog and tech site focused on hardware and software guides for Linux creatives. Even set up a forum because I was fed up with digging through scattered mailing lists and Discord servers for information. I like to think it has helped some people and it gives me a chance to practice writing human-readable documentation.
Readit News
1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found
In the past I got a job I had for 8 years through my blog, a startup that eventually sold....
So, it's been pretty good for me, and doesn't actually take that much extra effort on top of the learning you do daily working in tech.
For startups and small companies I think it makes a huge difference.
At one job I was told explicitly I was hired mostly because the hiring manager liked my website - I wasn't the only one that passed the interview process and so my website was why I was chosen. He liked how minimalist it was.
At another, one of the engineers found a bug on my website and my interview was to pair program a fix with him.
When I'm in charge of hiring I strongly prefer candidates that have some kind of web presence that lets me structure the interview more towards what they've presented about themselves.
Also I have gotten clients that originally found me because they googled "how to rent a motorcycle in Taiwan" and I rank #1 for that search apparently.
But… having (not so often updated) blog myself - I will try to change my behavior in future and mention it somehow during interview ;)
However, even at big companies it can be useful depending on context but you have to bring it up in relation to why you are a fit for the job. Genuine enthusiasm goes a long way especially in the dry corporate world.
Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.
- https://write.as - a https://writefreely.org instance that also syncs with Mastodon, so people can see/discover/subscribe/ comment on your posts without extra hassle of setting up comments or other privacy invading tools.
- https://bearblog.dev - just text, very simple and quick to get started.
I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.
I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't write about anything that someone else with much deeper expertise hasn't already written about.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
I did it to share without having any idea who was reading or not. Probably nobody back then.
But it became a habit. Beyond tech topics, I started blogging about broader subjects: organization, hiring, salaries, company building.
And it's incredible how much I relied on it later as a sort of documentation, especially for everything related to company building. It's so valuable to re-read why we made certain decisions in the past. And it's also so valuable to be able to point new colleagues to that knowledge base.
And technically, I had fun. I went through Joomla, self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com. I built my own plugins. Then I developed my own open source static blog generator (bloggrify.com) in the Nuxt ecosystem. That's when I created an English version of my blog.
Then I started feeling the need to share differently. I had the impression that blogging was becoming outdated, that younger generations weren't reading anymore. So I tried video format on YouTube.
I really enjoyed video production - there's still so much to learn: equipment, techniques, new tools.
But I realized that each format has its pros and cons. It's so much easier to update text when it becomes obsolete. It's also so much faster to produce. Video is so hard to make. So I got back into writing and even took it further by creating a blogging platform (writizzy.com).
In short, I learned a lot because I documented everything I did, which forced me to dig deeper into each topic to avoid saying nonsense. I also learned a lot because I wanted to test approaches, make videos, learn to build a static site generator and many other things, purely for the sake of learning.
Today, one piece of advice I give to every senior dev is to take the time to write. Doesn't matter if it's to publish somewhere or not. But to lay out your ideas, dig deeper into them, get perspective.
>3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
These are generally why I blog. I write the articles with an audience in mind, because I don't know a concept if I can't explain it cogently. And also I actually tend to refer back to my blog for my own reference surprisingly regularly. For example, I wrote an article on installing Debian on a PC Engines APU over the serial interface, and then getting the Unifi Controller running. Every so often when I update the Debian install on that box, or decide to change OSes on a different APU I'll refer to that article.
You wouldn't think that that would be so difficult but it was a surprisingly baroque process.
Oh hey, that's me! This post might actually encourage me to get back on top of things. Not only do I have two articles (more recent than 5 years though), one of them has a glaring error that is somewhat foundational to what it's supposed to be about. I have to fix that, as well as my broken RSS feed, and get my git link re-directed to my self-hosted forge, and update all my remotes, remove some defunct links and menu options, and then decide which of my 68 (yes, 68!) blog drafts I want to focus on publishing next. Now that I've listed it out, I bet I can get all that done over the break.
You have to lower your standards.
I make a point of hitting "publish" when I'm still not entirely happy with what I've written, because I know that the alternative is a folder full of drafts and nothing published at all.
Nobody who reads your stuff will ever know how good it could have been if you kept on polishing it.
And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.
You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple, adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more advanced use cases.
Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-depl...
[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/
On a side note, after writing frequently for ~12 years, I didn't write anything for the next 6. This discussion came at the right time - it nudged me to publish two posts yesterday.
But write it yourself, dont let LLMs do it. Otherwise forget the sixth reason.
Good written communication is one of the key skills needed at the senior / staff engineer level. Blogging is a great way to exercise those skills.
ugh, I hate this. Often when doing a search for how to do something I get 100 beginner blogs that cover the absolute basics but have no depth. People who know what they're doing are drowned out.
Here's a few of my recent link blog posts that exist purely to boost great writing about technology:
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/21/dependency-cooldowns/
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/nano-banana-can-be-pro...
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/11/scaling-hnsws/
I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.
Deleted Comment
> You are a proof reader for posts about to be published.
> 1. Identify for spelling mistakes and typos
> 2. Identify grammar mistakes
> 3. Watch out for repeated terms like "It was interesting that X, and it was interesting that Y"
> 4. Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes
> 5. Highlight weak arguments that could be strengthened
> 6. Make sure there are no empty or placeholder links
I do occasionally use an LLM to reformat data - "turn this screenshot into a Markdown list" kind of thing.
I had it write me an HTML price comparison table for this post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/#pricing - here's how: https://chatgpt.com/share/6921b10b-0124-8006-9356-8e32f6335b... - I carefully checked the numbers before I published it!
I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my readers to subscribe to things.
Then I tried substack but they lean too heavily on the "newsletter" paradigm which I hate. Also they are starting to enshittify now too.
I don't mind paying for a service but they always want to double dip in tracking readers and selling subscriptions to them as well. Yuck.
Dead Comment
HN is a great source, but you'll notice over time there are always AskHN posts asking something like "What is a site like HN for..", and people trying to build HN clones.
Reddit was good for a while for this, but hasn't been for a long time.
I'm hoping people rediscover/reinvent slashdot.
It works really well if you're looking for a cozier timeline.
0: https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true
1: https://kagi.com/smallweb
It's just a list of hyperlinks to other sites with brief descriptions. I think it's a good idea and everyone should create one on their small website.
Similarity navigation: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net
Backlinks: https://marginalia-search.com/site/simonwillison.net?view=li...
As a Kagi customer I have to say that's a disappointingly short list and static approach :/
You can also scour all 14,000+ sources for posts that match your interests.
https://scour.ing
I started blogging about tech and security when I was 13/14 years old in my native language. Then, when I felt more mature, I switched to a new blog where English was the main language. I started improving my language skills, getting some donation from kind strangers for my blog posts and using it as a self-branding forever running-side project.
Now, 20 years later I still have my personal blog and I still write about tech, but only recently I created some "personal related" tabs, like the "/now" page, enriching it every month or having a more personal about page. Why? Because I like going to a blog a see that behind that address there is a real person with emotions and dreams, it's like entering in their home and have a look around.
1. Improve your language skills
2. Self-branding
3. Memorize better topics you care about
4. Share what you learned with others
About LLM, I don't care if they scrape my blog, I use LLMs every day, and if some stuff I write helps to enrich an LLM with a positive impact I would be more than happy to let it happens, the more we write, the less fake-news and low-quality content would ingest and used.
The logic was, if you cannot communicate, you cannot explain why your job, or what you're doing is important. If it has value. If you have value. You cannot hope to explain requirements to others. Or explain the logic or reasons, the "why" of a technical path.
You're likely correct that a lot of people think this unimportant. To them I'd say, they're severely limiting their career, if they don't think communicating is important.
Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.
Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.
Playing telephone has now been automated ...
I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.
One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
(I fear) the blog of this generation's kids is called TikTok or whatever and the form is video instead of text.
Why? YouTube pays creators, blogs don't.
It was about sharing bits of your daily life and personal thoughts and feelings, while building a small community. Having more than 50-100 readers was a major event (and not a thing people aimed for).
My hunger-self does feel so memories are as lucid made with others in hope
"
...say, "People making a name of 'themselfes' for profit (boinboing IIRC), cos it has to be a (1994) profit ?
And to say something, that: it is only "the complexity of big-tech-companys", in terms of content" ?
Asking, cos i tryed...
I do it for um... "politikum" (if that is the correct term) maybe while keeping to give someone an excuse to laugh about...
...try, but remember mostly after a day or two, maybe one week... often before i lost a (often needed) password or email-adress, i delete it.
Did it for fun, get lost...than => doing something other...
> //deviantart.com/journalseducatethink/gallery
regards, ...
PS: rewritten while listening to: > //youtu.be/dzw7u9KOOBM?t=66
Personal blogs are not "back". The article has zero evidence for this.
Ironically, Darren Rowse (the "problogger" person cited in the article) hasn't published a new blog post since 2024-07-24, more than a year ago.
I've released a new post every week for 10 years straight.
My traffic in the last 2 years is worse than the first 2 years. At the blog's peak I was getting around 180k unique visitors a month for years.
I was able to build a whole business around selling tech courses and doing contract work for the last 10 years but now traffic is so little that this is no longer feasible (not even close).
Just looking at the numbers, it's very likely related to Google not sending as much traffic as they used to because they either inline my content on their search engine results or AI results are used now instead of people visiting individual sites.
I still do it because I enjoy the process and my main motivator was never money but at the same time you need to be able to sustain yourself too. It's a bummer to be honest.
On that note, a ton of great non-money related opportunities came my way due to posts I've written in the past so I won't be stopping. I hope these continue.
The idea of personal blogging is for your own growth and history.
That was why I started. Any business I got were byproducts of writing organically about the things I was working on. Courses were also a byproduct of doing the same type of contract work for many different clients.
- Google no longer sending traffic
- Users staying on social media (facebook/x/instagram/youtube/tiktok) and not even clicking external links
I've thought about two potential ways of getting around this:
1. Maintain two separate blogs, one professional, one personal, make the personal blog pseudonymous, and put all the things I don't want employers to see over there. This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice? (perhaps the work is just of selecting where to put the post after I'm done writing it, though.) 2. Maintain one blog, and not care about market hire or anything like that. This...would work, but I'm not sure about potential bad effects because of this. I could just choose to write completely pseudonymously instead. I'm not sure.
I mostly post tech things, but at some point I wanted to share a few thoughts about a touchy subject like dating. I had the same dilemma - the last thing I wanted was for it to backfire professionally. At that time I was a consultant and freelancer, so looking for a job wasn’t something I did every few years, but more on a continuous basis.
My girlfriend back then encouraged me to post under my name, as long as I was comfortable being asked about it and defending my words (I was, so I did).
The reception from friends was positive. To my surprise, it had a neutral to mildly positive professional impact, "this is a tech guy, but he has soft skills".
And as you can see, there are quite a few posts like that (side ideas, physical and mental health, relationships).
---
Of course, your mileage may vary. Tech is one thing, but for many jobs (especially government, public service, primary education) it might be different.
It also depends on the general norms within a country—what’s taboo, and how far you’re willing to cross it.
At the same time, when I’ve heard of someone being rejected due to their online presence, it was mostly not about the views themselves, but about how they were expressed. Raging hate might be off-putting—even to those who share a similar bias.
After all, many of your readers are also human beings with lives, maybe even lives similar to yours based on your professional content. (The rest of your readers are LLMs.) Your readers might appreciate your perspectives on random life things or just getting to see what their favorite blogger is up to.
> This seems fine, but also feels like too much work in practice?
Once you've finished procrastinating on your perfect stack to run/generate the blog, it's easy to set up a second.
That's the route I decided to choose when I started my professional career. I already had a personal (pseudonymous) blog. And that's where I put the stuff around work.
I decided to go this way for many reasons.
First, because I don't want it to be a source of pressure. If I talk about work stuff and make a big mistake, then people can call me out on it and it would tarnish my reputation.
Second, because I want to share things for free and to help others first, not to help myself/my career.
Last and related, if I was using it as a self-promoting media, I would focus on things that would help my career, not on things that I find funny or that I think can help someone else. So it would BE work. And it would only take a few months before I would be tired of it.
Also since I've mostly worked on heavily regulated things, I'm quite limited about what I could publicly communicate.
Now, I have my own personal room on the Internet where I can discuss everything I want, without feeling any pressure about how or what or when I should write about anything.
I think the only thing that can derail a job application is if your personal blog makes you look patently unreasonable, either by supporting causes that are socially unacceptable ("it's OK to hit women") or getting way too angry over mundane stuff ("everyone working at Microsoft should be shot"). But if you just happen to have an opinion about a politician, whatever.
Where it gets dicey is if you're in a leadership position, especially director and above. Then, you're sort of paid to keep your opinions to yourself, because when you have an organization of 100 people or more, at least several will disagree with your politics and will then judge your actions through that prism, leading to drama and possible HR fights.
I don't feel like I've had any negative impact from that, or I'm very privileged to be able to say I don't care if I have had any impact from that - I've done fairly well for myself, and I can remind people I'm a full human being!