How many hackers out there run their own personal blog?
My blog: Personal app milestones, interesting app statistics.
Traffic: 5k unique/month, >100k back in June 2011 (when I was active).
Every so often I receive unsolicited (but much appreciated) offers from SV, NYC, and Israel to work at a startup doing iOS development or management. A number of these have been well funded by top-tier VCs. What drives my traffic? A blog post detailing the most common iPhone passcodes, a blog post detailing how piracy doubled my legitimate sales (despite it being a poor post), and another blog post describing how to programmatically detect the apps installed on the iPhone.
In my opinion, a personal blog is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise to those who are interested, and a way to increase your luck surface area.
Side note: I like Bump (YC S09), and I duplicated a minor feature of theirs (app detection in v2.X). Because I blogged about their feature and how I did it myself, a few people at Bump read my post. Later on, I found out that the CEO of another major company was referred to me for advice by them. I'm probably nothing special to Bump, but when I graduate, if I want to go work at Bump, I'm not just another name.
This line is gold. I've been saying the same thing but I use 'increase the probability out outlier events'. Yours sound much nicer :)