Back in 2006-2009, I had a computer security blog and it was helpful, it was an artefact employers could look at to see what I knew. I also got some incoming in

Back in 2006-2009, I had a computer security blog and it was helpful, it was an artefact employers could look at to see what I knew. I also got some incoming interest from recruiters for fairly senior positions (eg Director level), that didn't quite pan out. It also led to conference presentations, not directly, but it led to me doing work to submit to conferences, etc, and I already had a bit of a reputation at the time. The conference presentations led to more connections with people and an easier time landing interviews & jobs. I decided to pivot my career to ML a few years back and contributed some code and wrote some Medium posts. One of them got a fair amount of traction and generated inbound recruiter interest from a pretty big name company, though by that point I had already landed myself a gig, so it was less relevant. I don't think it ever gave me an unconditional benefit, i.e. no promotions/unconditional offers of work, but being more visible/connected presented more opportunities that I may not otherwise have had available to me.