Ask HN: Has blogging helped your career?
8 comments
I am kind of on the same boat as you. I have been doing ASP.NET and .NET contracting in a large enterprise for the last four years and my contract just ended so I am trying to plan the for next 10 years to do consulting and develop my own products. I picked up some Laravel and React\Redux during my time consulting and have been following ASP.NET Core as well. Last week I made an ASP.NET core boilerplate https://github.com/aregsar/house , still in progress, that you may find interesting. One concept that I am going to use for my blog posts and presentations is to have some unique perspective or theme that weaves through all of my content. I can then use that for branding and setting myself apart from others in the field. It could be a development perspective or opinion or even a controversial idea that is effective in some situations but goes against the norm or best practices. Anyway, good luck.
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.
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.
Personally, I just make a blog for myself, so I can send someone a link instead of explaining myself over again.
Most of the emails I've gotten haven't really been useful though, but I have met interesting people I would not have otherwise.
At the end of the day, people don't know you, or know what you know. There's many ways to present this information, be it youtube videos or blogs, or both. People can either find you through keyword aggregation, looking for similar problems and find yours, or simply looking at your resume and click to learn more about you
Just depends what you are aiming for. You can have multiple blogs if you want as well, crosspost for greater effect, etc
Most of the emails I've gotten haven't really been useful though, but I have met interesting people I would not have otherwise.
At the end of the day, people don't know you, or know what you know. There's many ways to present this information, be it youtube videos or blogs, or both. People can either find you through keyword aggregation, looking for similar problems and find yours, or simply looking at your resume and click to learn more about you
Just depends what you are aiming for. You can have multiple blogs if you want as well, crosspost for greater effect, etc
Yes, blogging has helped me a good amount. It has led to all of: job offers or longer term contracts (some accepted), consulting work, and training work.
Multiple clients have mentioned that they got to know of me via my blog [1], while searching for either consultants or trainers on areas where they needed work done or training conducted. It has helped me get such work involving Python, PDF generation [2], Unix / Linux, C, Ruby, to mention some areas. But of course it can work for any area. E.g. I've got some project management consulting work, in the past, although I do not focus on that area much nowadays.
[1] My main blog: https://jugad2.blogspot.com
Open source projects can also work. What I said above about my blog helping me get work, applies to my open source projects too, e.g.:
[2] My xtopdf project (a Python toolkit for PDF generation from many other data formats):
Overview: https://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf
Project repo: https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf
It needs some cleanup and more docs, which I will work on over some time, but is basically usable and works for what it is meant to. It's also in use by some organizations, such as Packt Publishing, UK (for their book production workflow), the Software Freedom Law Center, USA (for e-discovery) and ESRI, NL, among others.
Multiple clients have mentioned that they got to know of me via my blog [1], while searching for either consultants or trainers on areas where they needed work done or training conducted. It has helped me get such work involving Python, PDF generation [2], Unix / Linux, C, Ruby, to mention some areas. But of course it can work for any area. E.g. I've got some project management consulting work, in the past, although I do not focus on that area much nowadays.
[1] My main blog: https://jugad2.blogspot.com
Open source projects can also work. What I said above about my blog helping me get work, applies to my open source projects too, e.g.:
[2] My xtopdf project (a Python toolkit for PDF generation from many other data formats):
Overview: https://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf
Project repo: https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf
It needs some cleanup and more docs, which I will work on over some time, but is basically usable and works for what it is meant to. It's also in use by some organizations, such as Packt Publishing, UK (for their book production workflow), the Software Freedom Law Center, USA (for e-discovery) and ESRI, NL, among others.
Blogging more is a great idea! Especially technical blogging. You might think there's a lot of content out there, but the percentage of developers that also write for people is small.
I've had recruiters mention my blog [1] and Stack Overflow [2] when reaching out. I don't even post much, but I have a handful of technical posts and talks collected there, and I think being able to hand someone a compact "portfolio" of career capital like that is a nice touch.
I feel the same way about answering questions on Stack Overflow by the way. To me every answer to a sufficiently complex question has the potential to be a mini blog post.
Another benefit to you is that it shows that you know what you're talking about. There are a lot of topics that you know well, that your close friends know that you know well, but that strangers on the interwebs don't know you know well.
[1]: https://blog.tedmiston.com/
[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston?tab=a...
I've had recruiters mention my blog [1] and Stack Overflow [2] when reaching out. I don't even post much, but I have a handful of technical posts and talks collected there, and I think being able to hand someone a compact "portfolio" of career capital like that is a nice touch.
I feel the same way about answering questions on Stack Overflow by the way. To me every answer to a sufficiently complex question has the potential to be a mini blog post.
Another benefit to you is that it shows that you know what you're talking about. There are a lot of topics that you know well, that your close friends know that you know well, but that strangers on the interwebs don't know you know well.
[1]: https://blog.tedmiston.com/
[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston?tab=a...
I know at least one of my interviewers checked out my personal blog as they asked about it during my interview. I used my blog as a dev/learning diary of sorts and it has code snippets, thoughts on approaches I'm taking to certain personal projects, lists of games I'd made and worked on, etc. I've also made interesting connections and had people reach out with various opportunities via my personal site/blog.
Yes it has
- Being freelance, companies have contacted me with project offers
- It has helped me to improve my skills as I believe that writing is one of the best methods to learn and digest new material
- It also showed me that I enjoy teaching a lot which has encouraged me to focus more on that routeWriting a blog post on "how to ..." elevated my career to level I never dreamed possible.
I am thinking ahead to what I want to achieve over the next 10 years.
Over the last few years I have hopped around a few jobs, and on the side learned Haskell and some other stuff, as a nice contrast to my .NET bread and butter experience.
I am now thinking to concentrate back on .NET, especially now there is a really nice ecosystem with .NET Core, ASP.NET Core, Typescript etc.
As part of this I am thinking of doing a mix of blogging, some presentations at local groups, and maybe some "self published" books, all on stuff I am super familiar with from years of experience. One example would be design patterns - I found most of the design pattern explanations on the web pretty horrendous, and not as much care goes into them as the Haskell equivalents (e.g. monad tutorials!). So there is a 'gap in the market' there I could hopefully explain them better.
I wanted to see if anyone has had any success blogging where success could mean:
1. Found out about a great job because someone reached out due to blogging. 2. Got some freelance work in a similar fashion. 3. Got promoted at work because of been seen as an expert. 4. Framed themselves as an expert and got a better job or higher paid or genuinely 'head hunted' as a result.
I'm interested in all experiences .NET or otherwise!