I maintained a blog for a few years (mostly while preparing to take the Cisco CCNP exams) but I haven't wrote regularly for going on five years. It was extremel

I maintained a blog for a few years (mostly while preparing to take the Cisco CCNP exams) but I haven't wrote regularly for going on five years. It was extremely beneficial to me in several ways. I ran into an issue with some HP ProCurve switches that HP basically said "yeah, that can't happen". It was only after writing it up -- along with a video -- and someone from HP reading it that they reached back out to me, flew an engineer out to "witness" it firsthand, and fix it. Later, they flew me out to Roseville for a few days to hang out with some of their engineers. Later, they invited me (and paid all my expenses) to attend an HP Tech Day as well as Interop NYC. In addition, I was invited to attend several Net Field Day [0] events where I got to hang out with some very smart people in the networking industry in Silicon Valley. Stephen Foskett, the guy behind NFD, knew about me from my blog. Also, while I was at one of the NFD events, I got an e-mail from someone who "knew me" from my blog. An ISP in my area needed a new Network Engineer to replace their main guy who had just left. They were about to start doing some new things and needed someone with lots of experience with OSPF and BGP in particular. After I returned, I met the owners to chat over breakfast one morning. I've been working there a little over five years now. I've done a handful of small "side jobs" as well, mostly for smaller companies whose IT guys found me via a Google search and reached out to me for assistance. Last, it's certainly not making me rich but (even though I really haven't written much in the last five years) the ads that appear on my blog (and Youtube videos) still earn enough so that Google has to send me a 1099 every year. Beer money. :-) ETA: I actually wrote up a similar post, "Why You Should Be Blogging" [1] in 2011. It was kinda sorta aimed at others studying for Cisco exams but I think it's probably general enough to apply to the HN crowd as well (I haven't re-read it recently, TBH). [0]: http://techfieldday.com/ http://techfieldday.com/ [1]: http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-blogging/ http://evilrouters.net/2011/10/20/why-you-should-be-blogging...