The LinkedIn feed problem can be solved by not going to the feed.
Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. That’s fine with me. I write for myself. Much of what I’ve written has “aged out,” by now (for example, I have a series on the Swift Programming Language[1], that may reflect dated observations).
When I write stuff, it helps me to “firm up” my own knowledge and understanding.
I’m no longer seeking work, but have a LinkedIn profile, so anyone that wants to know me, can get an idea. I basically stay away from LI. Every now and then, I may make a post, when I do a release of something .
I also will check out candidates’ blogs if they list them. Some people have “blogs” but the content is mostly throwaway or hello world, but anything more than that is impressive to me. (Same thing with GitHub, hopefully it contains more than just forks of various repos with minimal diffs.)
Even if you don't get any useful organic traffic, I find having a technical blog is useful so that when you do go to interviews or submit resumes, hirers can read your blog and quickly establish that you know what you are talking about.
No need to fix it if you don't want to but may be useful.
But if there's a place where the text doesn't separate (and flow below), that's a bug, so I'll review.
I’ll check it out. That’s an old post, that was imported wholesale, from another site.
There was a link to a post, here, some time ago, that was about why we should write, and it was mostly for self-benefit. That's why I do it. I'm retired, and spend time learning and honing my skills. I write code for free, for folks that can't afford folks like me. I like to do a good job at it, and I like learning new stuff.
I've found that writing [tutorials, especially] is a great way for me to learn.
Except that it's 100% AI generated.
So it's only a matter a time before having a personal technical blog is seen as average as having a LinkedIn & GitHub account...
2) Wayback machine exists.
3) People who are bad at tech jobs will probably be bad at creating convincing fake tech blogs.
For a dev? Surely you are not being serious.
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?
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/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing
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.)
If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.
- a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE 3 (L6) position when I had nothing on my LinkedIn profile aside from a bunch of CRUD jobs on my profile. I
- After talking to the recruiter, they suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS Professional Services which I did get. Funny enough, I had two recruiters reach out to me from Amazon on LinkedIn while I was - working at Amazon and it was on my profile.
- I had a recruiter from Google reach out to me while I was at Amazon for an Engineering Manager position. The problem is, my current position wasn’t even a software developer on my profile and I had no management experience.
- a recruiter from Meta hounded me for months about a senior position as a developer specializing in AI. Did I mention that my most recent role at the time wasn’t as a software developer and I had no AI experience?
- Even before working at Amazon, recruiters from Netflix reached out to me. No I wouldn’t have had any chance passing the interview
Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. I still get recruiters from BigTech reaching out to me about software development positions even though for the past five years my profile clearly shows a pivot to cloud consulting and customer engagement.
The purpose of the tech blog isn’t to impress recruiters because as you say they are impressed if you mention drinking a cup of java once or have a pet python. The primary purpose is for your own understanding. The secondary purpose is to impress someone familiar with your field.
> Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies.
That’s just not how things work at FAANG. There is a regimented process with multiple interviews and then after the interviews, all of the interviewers enter their notes and discuss. I can’t imagine anyone in the loop saying “I read their blog post and they should be hired”.
Hiring is completely about some combination of how the candidate did on coding, system design and behavioral interviews.
In 2010 (15 years ago), all of the current FAANG companies were already large except Meta and it was growing rapidly.
In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people were blogging? 20 years ago, the interview process was even more esoteric than it is today at least at Google. I haven’t heard stories about any of the others
Yes I was around back then.
Yes, I can see someone standing out in 2005 making helpful blogs qualifying under this. I can see it in 2015 as well if they are a subject matter expert or happen to otherwise be explaining the exact concepts a certain team needed.
I can't verify it firsthand, but clearly processes can be waived if desired. I did an entire interview gauntlet for my first "big" tech job in 2019. My lead hired the year prior describes his process as a director calling to him over lunch to talk about the company and basically got the offer on the spot, as if it was the 60's all over again. The director was in the same room as me nodding as my lead told the story.
Heck, even a mild anectode: a colleague of mine (maybe 2-3 years ahead of me in experience) was able to skip some coding test stage at Amazon to move through the process faster because he negotiated being close to another offer. Great worker but he didn't have any fancy accolades nor side projects/blogs. It was just a burning hot market and FAANG wanted whoever they could grab with good experience.
Hey, it's me, the person who said that!
>I read their blog post and they should be hired
Yes, that's what happened. Obviously, it's not "I read your blog, sign this contract, and you're hired." The actual sequence of events the one time I said yes was:
"Hey, I read your blog. I work for team X at company Y. Are you interested in working here?"
"Yes"
"OK, HR will contact you."
A 20-minute call with HR, followed by an invitation to onsite team interviews. One day of interviews. Job offer.
I have no idea what the internal process for that was, but I assume they have some referral program or something like that.
>In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people blogged?
I started blogging before the word "blogging" existed. I wrote my blogging software without knowing it was "blogging software."
Having a blog allows me to compile my notes into a digestible and easy to read way, so if I revisit a project later I at least don't have to start from scratch.
Openspot actually leans into that same idea: instead of feeding the algorithm, you just show your work — whether that’s a blog post, demo, video, or a quick walkthrough. It’s all hosted on your profile, so you can focus on signal over noise.
Stand out? "Write about stuff" is literally generic advice nowadays. Most of the content is crap, because people are only writing because other people suggest it.
And I really can't. Thanks, games industry. So I need to make it a full time job doing signifigant side projects just to show off my skills for jobs.
Even then, this market right now isn't in "we'll call you" mode unless you're highly specialized.
- Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control)
- Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only)
- Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls
- Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger)
- Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website
The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.
You can see examples on the discover page.
It has a small collection of simple pre-built themes, while also supporting custom CSS.
You can use GitHub pages with Hugo which is what I do. You can build out a series of GitHub gists that link to each other. You can host a static S3 website with raw HTML. You can post redundantly to Twitter/Bluesky/your own subreddit/Medium/Google drive.
It doesn’t matter if there’s no single solution to every possible problem. The point is to write something interesting so 1) you understand it better 2) you can reference it later if you forget some details 3) you can show off to potential employers.
Whether or not it’s owned by big tech is a non-goal as far as getting a job is concerned.
if you really can't be bothered to set any of that up, I suppose you can always find one of the non-mainstream open-source microblogging platforms. I'm sure there are some lovely "reddit alternatives" out there that feel great to blog on but has an audience of a dozen people internally.
[1]: https://write.as/
5 years ago maybe.
Now every tech/recruiting "influencer" suggests the same tactic, and the vast majority of it is pure slop, checking a box.