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Here are some reasons to start a personal blog: 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and wr
by simonw 1y ago
Here are some reasons to start a personal blog:
1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.
2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.
3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.
4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.
5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.
Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.
As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.
If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.
But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.
If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:
- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects
- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found
- Brajeshwar 1y agoI like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?” Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.
- simonw 1y agoI really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.
- Brajeshwar 1y agoOh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier. Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
- hdjrudni 1y agoPast-me was so dumb. Asked a lot of rookie questions. It's the one little piece of evidence that maybe I have actually learned a little something in the past 10 years.
- spankibalt 1y ago"[...] write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived." How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.