5 ms·

In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a personal technical blog. Write about things you’ve worked on. Doing is the best way to learn, and writing a

In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a personal technical blog. Write about things you’ve worked on. Doing is the best way to learn, and writing about doing is the second best way to show you know. (The first is a demo.) The LinkedIn feed problem can be solved by not going to the feed.

fliellerjulian 2y ago
Totally agree — writing about what you’ve built is a great way to both learn and stand out. Blogs, demos, and personal sites are powerful signals, especially in tech. Openspot actually leans into that same idea: instead of feeding the algorithm, you just show your work — whether that’s a blog post, demo, video, or a quick walkthrough. It’s all hosted on your profile, so you can focus on signal over noise.
- itsoktocry 2y ago
  >Totally agree — writing about what you’ve built is a great way to both learn and stand out Stand out? "Write about stuff" is literally generic advice nowadays. Most of the content is crap, because people are only writing because other people suggest it.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies and book offers from publishers (some of the latter I accepted). It's also a good exercise to get better at your job because communicating effectively is just as important a skill for programmers as writing code is.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Are you saying that anyone in your interview loop took time to read your blog posts? And it wasn’t just you passing the standard interview process like everyone else has to do.
  - samrus 2y ago
    I read it as them being approached by faang recruiters or hiring managers because they happened to stumble upon their blog and thought they might be a good fit. Although idk if that sort of thing happens anymore
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      FAANG recruiters are dumb and not selective. They definitely don’t look at blog posts. - a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE 3 (L6) position when I had nothing on my LinkedIn profile aside from a bunch of CRUD jobs on my profile. I - After talking to the recruiter, they suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS Professional Services which I did get. Funny enough, I had two recruiters reach out to me from Amazon on LinkedIn while I was - working at Amazon and it was on my profile. - I had a recruiter from Google reach out to me while I was at Amazon for an Engineering Manager position. The problem is, my current position wasn’t even a software developer on my profile and I had no management experience. - a recruiter from Meta hounded me for months about a senior position as a developer specializing in AI. Did I mention that my most recent role at the time wasn’t as a software developer and I had no AI experience? - Even before working at Amazon, recruiters from Netflix reached out to me. No I wouldn’t have had any chance passing the interview Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. I still get recruiters from BigTech reaching out to me about software development positions even though for the past five years my profile clearly shows a pivot to cloud consulting and customer engagement.
      - janalsncm 2y ago
        > Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. The purpose of the tech blog isn’t to impress recruiters because as you say they are impressed if you mention drinking a cup of java once or have a pet python. The primary purpose is for your own understanding. The secondary purpose is to impress someone familiar with your field.
    - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
      People inside the company (not recruiters) read my blog and started the recruiting process.
- rs186 2y ago
  Are you comfortable with sharing the URL of your blog? I find the idea interesting, but also puzzling -- If you work at a commercial company on proprietary software, like most of software engineers, there is very limited amount of things you can talk about work and not leak proprietary/internal information. Otherwise, you need to work enough outside work to have things you can talk about freely. I don't want to have a blog where it's all opinion and no concrete details, like my meaningless comments on HN. How do you manage to post "useful" things on a personal blog?
  - wonger_ 2y ago
    I'm also curious about what kinds of posts were good enough to get job offers. In my experience it's hard to consistently produce thorough, accurate, and useful technical posts. It takes so much time. If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.
  - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    You can discuss things unrelated to genuinely proprietary information. But this depends on the company—I worked for several companies whose secret sauce was more related to proprietary business information rather than proprietary tech, so they gave close to zero shits if I publicly wrote about it and, at times, republished my posts on their own company blog to make themselves more attractive to devs. I also have a bunch of personal projects about which I can talk. Topics like "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" contain genuinely useful information, but the company I worked for at the time didn't consider them proprietary because the proprietary stuff was what they ran on the cluster. I'll acknowledge that this won't be the case for everybody. I've been pretty lucky that none of the companies I worked for prevented me from writing about these topics; some were happy to use what I wrote for their own promotional material. (I don't want to dox myself, so I'd rather not share a link to my blog, and "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" isn't the literal title of a blog post I wrote.)
  - jamietanna 2y ago
    I'd recommend having a read of my blog (https://www.jvt.me/archives/ https://www.jvt.me/archives/), as I've been in a similar position, and heavily blogging my career For instance between 2016-2021 where I was working in a large financial institution (Capital One), but still blogging about the work I was doing and problems I was solving, without leaking proprietary information A lot of them didn't have the "context" for what problem was being solved or why, or I'd need to create a minimal example to help explain what needs to be fixed, which is also a very good skill to be more practiced in You can also see how over the years of my career (https://hire.jvt.me/ https://hire.jvt.me/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing
tombert 2y ago
I've recently started blogging again, mostly as a form of documentation for myself later at this point. I'm always working on some weird project, I'll get to some milestone, lose a bit of interest, think about it two months later only to realize I'd have to relearn everything and don't do it. Having a blog allows me to compile my notes into a digestible and easy to read way, so if I revisit a project later I at least don't have to start from scratch.
dabockster 2y ago
Agreed, but there isn't a really solid blogging platform anymore that: - Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control) - Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only) - Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls - Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger) - Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Micro.blog covers all of your requirement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro.blog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro.blog
- lategloriousgnu 2y ago
  Bear Blog meets every one of your requirements. https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev You can see examples on the discover page. https://bearblog.dev/discover https://bearblog.dev/discover It has a small collection of simple pre-built themes, while also supporting custom CSS. https://docs.bearblog.dev/styling https://docs.bearblog.dev/styling
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  At that point you just whip up a github pages domain and use your favorite frontend framework with some blogging framework taken into account. If Microsoft is still a deterrent, you just register your own domain and pay the dozen bucks per year to keep it spinning. if you really can't be bothered to set any of that up, I suppose you can always find one of the non-mainstream open-source microblogging platforms. I'm sure there are some lovely "reddit alternatives" out there that feel great to blog on but has an audience of a dozen people internally.
- jorams 2y ago
  There's a ton of those platforms, varying from extremely unknown to fairly well established. I'm pretty sure multiple of them end up as a Show HN every year. The only thing on your list they generally don't do is domain registration, but keeping that separate is generally a good thing. Sibling mentioned bearblog.dev, I'll mention write.as[1]. [1]: https://write.as/ https://write.as/
deanebarker 2y ago
I've written 20K or so words about this idea (meta-idea?). Some of those words might be intelligent... https://ineffable.deanebarker.net/ https://ineffable.deanebarker.net/
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I have a personal technical journal[0]. Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. That’s fine with me. I write for myself. Much of what I’ve written has “aged out,” by now (for example, I have a series on the Swift Programming Language[1], that may reflect dated observations). When I write stuff, it helps me to “firm up” my own knowledge and understanding. I’m no longer seeking work, but have a LinkedIn profile, so anyone that wants to know me, can get an idea. I basically stay away from LI. Every now and then, I may make a post, when I do a release of something . [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ [1] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/ https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/
- ukoki 2y ago
  > Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. Even if you don't get any useful organic traffic, I find having a technical blog is useful so that when you do go to interviews or submit resumes, hirers can read your blog and quickly establish that you know what you are talking about.
- jpc0 2y ago
  Unrelated note, the inline images (at least in the infrastructure post) makes reading quite hard on mobile since in some parts it's literally a single word per line. No need to fix it if you don't want to but may be useful.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    The images do resize and reflow, to adapt to the viewing context. My phone is an iPhone Mini, and I use that as a lowest common denominator, although I do test with an original SE. But if there's a place where the text doesn't separate (and flow below), that's a bug, so I'll review.
    - jpc0 2y ago
      Specifically in [0] all the images after and including the stirrups have less than one word of text next to them. If it helps inventions cuts off as inventi-ons. I'm on iPhone 8 safari if that helps but is also an older target so as I said if it's outside of scope not necessarily something I'm terribly worried about, it's still readable just a little annoying. 0. https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/ https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/
johnnyanmac 2y ago
> Write about things you’ve worked on. And I really can't. Thanks, games industry. So I need to make it a full time job doing signifigant side projects just to show off my skills for jobs. Even then, this market right now isn't in "we'll call you" mode unless you're highly specialized.
symlinkk 2y ago
Good way to have your knowledge fed into an LLM.
- grudzo 2y ago
  Good. That's what I want. Makes it easier for me to get the answer again in the future if I can just ask an LLM instead of hunting through my old blog posts.
wiether 2y ago
I know several coworkers/ex-coworkers that are bad at their job who followed your advice and publish at least once a week on their personal technical blog. Except that it's 100% AI generated. So it's only a matter a time before having a personal technical blog is seen as average as having a LinkedIn & GitHub account...
- janalsncm 2y ago
  1) Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to begin with. 2) Wayback machine exists. 3) People who are bad at tech jobs will probably be bad at creating convincing fake tech blogs.
  - elicksaur 2y ago
    Their point is that with AI generation, (3) is already possible to hide.
  - whatnow37373 2y ago
    > Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to begin with. For a dev? Surely you are not being serious.
itsoktocry 2y ago
>In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a personal technical blog. 5 years ago maybe. Now every tech/recruiting "influencer" suggests the same tactic, and the vast majority of it is pure slop, checking a box.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I might ask the candidate about one of their blog posts if it is interesting. It will be pretty clear if they wrote it themselves.

fliellerjulian 2y ago

Totally agree — writing about what you’ve built is a great way to both learn and stand out. Blogs, demos, and personal sites are powerful signals, especially in tech. Openspot actually leans into that same idea: instead of feeding the algorithm, you just show your work — whether that’s a blog post, demo, video, or a quick walkthrough. It’s all hosted on your profile, so you can focus on signal over noise.

itsoktocry 2y ago
>Totally agree — writing about what you’ve built is a great way to both learn and stand out Stand out? "Write about stuff" is literally generic advice nowadays. Most of the content is crap, because people are only writing because other people suggest it.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies and book offers from publishers (some of the latter I accepted). It's also a good exercise to get better at your job because communicating effectively is just as important a skill for programmers as writing code is.

scarface_74 2y ago
Are you saying that anyone in your interview loop took time to read your blog posts? And it wasn’t just you passing the standard interview process like everyone else has to do.
- samrus 2y ago
  I read it as them being approached by faang recruiters or hiring managers because they happened to stumble upon their blog and thought they might be a good fit. Although idk if that sort of thing happens anymore
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    FAANG recruiters are dumb and not selective. They definitely don’t look at blog posts. - a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE 3 (L6) position when I had nothing on my LinkedIn profile aside from a bunch of CRUD jobs on my profile. I - After talking to the recruiter, they suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS Professional Services which I did get. Funny enough, I had two recruiters reach out to me from Amazon on LinkedIn while I was - working at Amazon and it was on my profile. - I had a recruiter from Google reach out to me while I was at Amazon for an Engineering Manager position. The problem is, my current position wasn’t even a software developer on my profile and I had no management experience. - a recruiter from Meta hounded me for months about a senior position as a developer specializing in AI. Did I mention that my most recent role at the time wasn’t as a software developer and I had no AI experience? - Even before working at Amazon, recruiters from Netflix reached out to me. No I wouldn’t have had any chance passing the interview Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. I still get recruiters from BigTech reaching out to me about software development positions even though for the past five years my profile clearly shows a pivot to cloud consulting and customer engagement.
    - janalsncm 2y ago
      > Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. The purpose of the tech blog isn’t to impress recruiters because as you say they are impressed if you mention drinking a cup of java once or have a pet python. The primary purpose is for your own understanding. The secondary purpose is to impress someone familiar with your field.
  - InsideOutSanta 2y ago
    People inside the company (not recruiters) read my blog and started the recruiting process.
rs186 2y ago
Are you comfortable with sharing the URL of your blog? I find the idea interesting, but also puzzling -- If you work at a commercial company on proprietary software, like most of software engineers, there is very limited amount of things you can talk about work and not leak proprietary/internal information. Otherwise, you need to work enough outside work to have things you can talk about freely. I don't want to have a blog where it's all opinion and no concrete details, like my meaningless comments on HN. How do you manage to post "useful" things on a personal blog?
- wonger_ 2y ago
  I'm also curious about what kinds of posts were good enough to get job offers. In my experience it's hard to consistently produce thorough, accurate, and useful technical posts. It takes so much time. If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.
- InsideOutSanta 2y ago
  You can discuss things unrelated to genuinely proprietary information. But this depends on the company—I worked for several companies whose secret sauce was more related to proprietary business information rather than proprietary tech, so they gave close to zero shits if I publicly wrote about it and, at times, republished my posts on their own company blog to make themselves more attractive to devs. I also have a bunch of personal projects about which I can talk. Topics like "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" contain genuinely useful information, but the company I worked for at the time didn't consider them proprietary because the proprietary stuff was what they ran on the cluster. I'll acknowledge that this won't be the case for everybody. I've been pretty lucky that none of the companies I worked for prevented me from writing about these topics; some were happy to use what I wrote for their own promotional material. (I don't want to dox myself, so I'd rather not share a link to my blog, and "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" isn't the literal title of a blog post I wrote.)
- jamietanna 2y ago
  I'd recommend having a read of my blog (https://www.jvt.me/archives/ https://www.jvt.me/archives/), as I've been in a similar position, and heavily blogging my career For instance between 2016-2021 where I was working in a large financial institution (Capital One), but still blogging about the work I was doing and problems I was solving, without leaking proprietary information A lot of them didn't have the "context" for what problem was being solved or why, or I'd need to create a minimal example to help explain what needs to be fixed, which is also a very good skill to be more practiced in You can also see how over the years of my career (https://hire.jvt.me/ https://hire.jvt.me/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing

tombert 2y ago

I've recently started blogging again, mostly as a form of documentation for myself later at this point. I'm always working on some weird project, I'll get to some milestone, lose a bit of interest, think about it two months later only to realize I'd have to relearn everything and don't do it. Having a blog allows me to compile my notes into a digestible and easy to read way, so if I revisit a project later I at least don't have to start from scratch.

dabockster 2y ago

Agreed, but there isn't a really solid blogging platform anymore that: - Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control) - Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only) - Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls - Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger) - Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.

scarface_74 2y ago
Micro.blog covers all of your requirement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro.blog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro.blog
lategloriousgnu 2y ago
Bear Blog meets every one of your requirements. https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev You can see examples on the discover page. https://bearblog.dev/discover https://bearblog.dev/discover It has a small collection of simple pre-built themes, while also supporting custom CSS. https://docs.bearblog.dev/styling https://docs.bearblog.dev/styling
johnnyanmac 2y ago
At that point you just whip up a github pages domain and use your favorite frontend framework with some blogging framework taken into account. If Microsoft is still a deterrent, you just register your own domain and pay the dozen bucks per year to keep it spinning. if you really can't be bothered to set any of that up, I suppose you can always find one of the non-mainstream open-source microblogging platforms. I'm sure there are some lovely "reddit alternatives" out there that feel great to blog on but has an audience of a dozen people internally.
jorams 2y ago
There's a ton of those platforms, varying from extremely unknown to fairly well established. I'm pretty sure multiple of them end up as a Show HN every year. The only thing on your list they generally don't do is domain registration, but keeping that separate is generally a good thing. Sibling mentioned bearblog.dev, I'll mention write.as[1]. [1]: https://write.as/ https://write.as/

deanebarker 2y ago

I've written 20K or so words about this idea (meta-idea?). Some of those words might be intelligent... https://ineffable.deanebarker.net/ https://ineffable.deanebarker.net/

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I have a personal technical journal[0]. Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. That’s fine with me. I write for myself. Much of what I’ve written has “aged out,” by now (for example, I have a series on the Swift Programming Language[1], that may reflect dated observations). When I write stuff, it helps me to “firm up” my own knowledge and understanding. I’m no longer seeking work, but have a LinkedIn profile, so anyone that wants to know me, can get an idea. I basically stay away from LI. Every now and then, I may make a post, when I do a release of something . [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ [1] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/ https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/

ukoki 2y ago
> Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. Even if you don't get any useful organic traffic, I find having a technical blog is useful so that when you do go to interviews or submit resumes, hirers can read your blog and quickly establish that you know what you are talking about.
jpc0 2y ago
Unrelated note, the inline images (at least in the infrastructure post) makes reading quite hard on mobile since in some parts it's literally a single word per line. No need to fix it if you don't want to but may be useful.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  The images do resize and reflow, to adapt to the viewing context. My phone is an iPhone Mini, and I use that as a lowest common denominator, although I do test with an original SE. But if there's a place where the text doesn't separate (and flow below), that's a bug, so I'll review.
  - jpc0 2y ago
    Specifically in [0] all the images after and including the stirrups have less than one word of text next to them. If it helps inventions cuts off as inventi-ons. I'm on iPhone 8 safari if that helps but is also an older target so as I said if it's outside of scope not necessarily something I'm terribly worried about, it's still readable just a little annoying. 0. https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/ https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/

johnnyanmac 2y ago

> Write about things you’ve worked on. And I really can't. Thanks, games industry. So I need to make it a full time job doing signifigant side projects just to show off my skills for jobs. Even then, this market right now isn't in "we'll call you" mode unless you're highly specialized.

symlinkk 2y ago

Good way to have your knowledge fed into an LLM.

grudzo 2y ago
Good. That's what I want. Makes it easier for me to get the answer again in the future if I can just ask an LLM instead of hunting through my old blog posts.

wiether 2y ago

I know several coworkers/ex-coworkers that are bad at their job who followed your advice and publish at least once a week on their personal technical blog. Except that it's 100% AI generated. So it's only a matter a time before having a personal technical blog is seen as average as having a LinkedIn & GitHub account...

janalsncm 2y ago
1) Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to begin with. 2) Wayback machine exists. 3) People who are bad at tech jobs will probably be bad at creating convincing fake tech blogs.
- elicksaur 2y ago
  Their point is that with AI generation, (3) is already possible to hide.
- whatnow37373 2y ago
  > Setting up a blog on your own domain is nontrivial to begin with. For a dev? Surely you are not being serious.

itsoktocry 2y ago

>In tech, I have found the best way to stand out is a personal technical blog. 5 years ago maybe. Now every tech/recruiting "influencer" suggests the same tactic, and the vast majority of it is pure slop, checking a box.

janalsncm 2y ago
I might ask the candidate about one of their blog posts if it is interesting. It will be pretty clear if they wrote it themselves.