
Ask HN: Has blogging helped your career? - quickthrower2
Hi all.<p>I am thinking ahead to what I want to achieve over the next 10 years.<p>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.<p>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.<p>As part of this I am thinking of doing a mix of blogging, some presentations at local groups, and maybe some &quot;self published&quot; 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 &#x27;gap in the market&#x27; there I could hopefully explain them better.<p>I wanted to see if anyone has had any success blogging where success could mean:<p>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 &#x27;head hunted&#x27; as a result.<p>I&#x27;m interested in all experiences .NET or otherwise!
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aregs
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](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.

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Eridrus
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.

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Kagerjay
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

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vram22
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](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](https://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf)

Project repo:
[https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf](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.

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tedmiston
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/](https://blog.tedmiston.com/)

[2]: [https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-
edmiston?tab=a...](https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-
edmiston?tab=answers&sort=activity)

------
drakonka
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.

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amorphous
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 route

------
gesman
Writing a blog post on "how to ..." elevated my career to level I never
dreamed possible.

~~~
gt2
Can you show the article?

~~~
gesman
[http://www.mensk.com/ibm-tealeaf-splunk-powerful-fraud-
inves...](http://www.mensk.com/ibm-tealeaf-splunk-powerful-fraud-
investigation-and-security-analytics-platform-for-financial-firms/)

