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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 sof

by 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

by rs186 2y ago

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