I’m ashamed to say that was me at some point. On top of that, those articles did nothing to further my career. All that mattered so far is my past experience, projects and how well I can (leet)code. Now if I start blogging again, it will have to be purely out of intellectual curiosity.

I think this is the same situation a lot of people find themselves in. I would say I'm the same. The further along I get in my career the more I find I'm interested in learning or exploring for my own good or interests, rather than some fake sense of credibility I got in the past.

Also me, but I did have one (on tolerance analysis) that helped my career.

It made rounds in the professional circles I traveled in and established myself as, while not necessarily a leader, someone at least very fluent in a particular process.

This was also in 2010 though, so the social landscape Was quite different

I confirm this doesn't do anything for your career, or at least not as much as just focusing that time on actual, paid work. I find that in my career my resume and experience that's on it as opposed to any side-projects or attempts at writing.

Yes, however on helping the career I think the writing is like a nice little detail on the resume, a way to make it standout a bit more, I also found that in a recent interview for a project an article I had just written on SVG was naturally relevant. As a general rule talking about little articles you've written isn't going to naturally happen in the interview because the interview process is focused on past work and horrible trick questions.

It has also been somewhat useful in projects where a concern with documentation has been expressed because the writing is a better example of my ability to document things than having worked on a lot of projects where you may be able to go see what we shipped but not be able to see anything of the documentation.

I think of the writing as the equivalent of a side project:

* it allows me to focus on something I want to learn

* it helps to make what I learn stick in my head

* it gives me a deadline and people who will send me emails to say how's it going with that

* it works as documentation for what I've learned

* it gives me a trivial amount of money for having taken the time to learn something. Basically the last article I wrote is paying for an annual Dropbox account, and a couple days worth of food for my family. It was way too much work for that to be worthwhile, but I did learn some things that will help with later stuff.

What's interesting is that this stuff works, which means there are idiot decision makers out there eating it up, which means the whole industry is ripe for disruption by someone who can see even an inch into the fog, so lets go do that

But HN was never hardcore tech content? It is more of general set of articles about wide range of tech issues.

Worrying development? HN has never been particularly enlightened in this respect, and has all of the same trends and superficial articles that emerge on the other networks. The illusion that it's some higher ground has never held true.

Based on your bio, you may be a bit biased in your assessment.

Someone should create that chart with ‘Lawful Good Dunning Kruger Expert’, ‘Chaotic Dunning Kruger Expert’, etc, since I need to know where I fit.

Biased, or simply consistent?

based and orangepilled