As I am neither a hiring manager, nor can I point to my own website and say "that helped me get a job", I offer the words of Philip Greenspun: A big salary can

As I am neither a hiring manager, nor can I point to my own website and say "that helped me get a job", I offer the words of Philip Greenspun: A big salary can evaporate quickly. Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession. http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup In my own opinion, a blog component only makes sense if you wish to write short (3-paragraph) posts. Use Wordpress if what Wordpress offers is what you want. On one hand, writing your own web framework can be a good learning experience and a good portfolio piece in itself; on the other hand, good programmers reuse existing code when possible. NOT writing your own web framework can be just as much of an indicator of your skills as writing one.