I regularly have conversations with people that end up with some form of "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."

Blogging has internal benefits of organizing thoughts or even just being a fun hobby. But it's external validation as well. Sure, writing a book is even more but that's probably 100s of times more work.

I have two book and tons of blog posts only a few people have read.. Still feels good. I even wrote a blog post on why.

Link? There’s nothing in your bio

Writing to fix all the slightly imperfect books that intrigued but disappointed you, you're onto something there.

Oh, so you are the guy with the unfixed ChatGPT ascii2dec: https://rodyne.com/?p=1674

guilty, my 1 viral moment in 10 years which broke my cheap web hosting :-)

> "Let's not belabor this over beers but I'll send you a link to something I wrote. It may be a little bit stale but let me know what you think and we can follow up."

How is it being received by those people? I can't help but imagine the response being:

"Okay but then what's the point of us sitting here with beers?"

Yeah I agree, someone saying they don't want to talk anymore because they've already written about something stops it being a discussion and makes it into some sort of lecture but without the notes. If you're insisting on telling someone you wrote about the current topic of conversation, you can just mention it and carry on with it. Like authors who go on podcasts, they'll say "Like I wrote in chapter X, I think that..." - the conversation shouldn't be killed off. Comes off as a bit arrogant.

I agree. Mentioning blog in the end is probably a better way. Finish the conversation, chain of thoughts and then before switching over to next topic or when saying byes or even a day or two later send them your post. But not in the middle of a conversation.

Maybe I didn't get the nuance in the best way. I think it would be more in the vein of we've probably explored this topic as much as we feel like it at the moment but maybe we can continue the conversation via some more deeply-thought sources.

Whether or not someone has written up or is willing to write up their opinion is a good way to determine how seriously to take that opinion.

Using that as a first pass has led to more time engaging with thoughtful people about well considered ideas, and less time listening to the noise that shows up when you solicit opinions.

Agreed, after a year or two, blogs become your experience logs to prove experience and credibility once the landscape is killed by GenAI slops and SEO scams.

Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.

> Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days(be it graphics, video, software, writing etc) but blog posts from 2023 and before are proof and undeniable.

I always read blogs if people include them in resumes.

It’s really cool when an applicant has a blog with unique and interesting content, but I can’t remember this happening without us already having been very impressed by the candidate’s resume.

More commonly, blog content was ambiguous about the applicant’s skills. For example, when someone applies to an embedded job but has a blog of beginner level Arduino projects, is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?

I also think people greatly overestimate the idea that someone will LLM their way into a great blog, and they greatly underestimate the difficulty of forging timestamps. Even git timestamps are easy to fake. Your interviewers aren’t going to scrutinize the Wayback machine for evidence, but not being indexed isn’t proof that it wasn’t there anyway.

Maybe it’s different in embedded, but as a mech e: any moderately complex hardware project will likely cost orders of magnitude more than a software project to prototype and manufacture. Off the self electronic parts have become much cheaper, but if you need more than some plastic, 3D parts it’s still expensive.

This isn’t true at all. Even custom PCBs are so trivially cheap that you can get 4-layer boards from China shipped for under $10. An ESP32 module is a couple bucks.

Electronic projects are extraordinarily cheap right now. I’ve built moderately complex PCBs for less than the price of a nice dinner.

A four layer board is not “moderately complex”, it’s child’s play. IMO moderately complex is in the 10-20 layer range with controlled impedance, buried vias, etc. or a mechanical assembly with hundreds of parts.

Everything definitely has gotten significantly cheaper than when I started working in mechanical/electronic engineering 15 years ago but a moderately complex board with assembly is still hundreds or thousands per board on short (1-2 week) notice. That’s what the GP means when they say that hardware prototypes are orders of magnitude more expensive (sans NRE) and I’m pretty sure they’re talking about the much more expensive mechanical side too, which also had gotten cheaper but not overwhelmingly so.

> is that because they’re an expert creating tutorials for beginners, or because they are a beginner and these entry-level projects represent their skill level?

You can tell by reading one of them though, right? For a subject I'm an expert at, I can tell the difference between an expert talking about the basics, and a beginner doing the same.

It's probably not the only input you want but, generally, I agree with your comment especially across a number of posts.

If they write a lot, then you can.

But in my experience reading a lot of applicants’ blogs, it’s rare to even find a recent post. The most common scenario I see is that the most recent posts are 3-10 years old. Even if you can get enough information out of their blog, you’re getting at best a snapshot of where they were a long time ago. The truth is that often people blog the most when they are beginners in a subject.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the ideal optimal blog that people imagine writing is an extreme rarity. I’ve seen so many people start blogs with high ambitions but then the farthest they get is a couple posts that are now so old that it barely corresponds to their current resume level of skills.

So you’re left doing a lot of guessing and extrapolating.

I've been treating public Git repository commits in the same vein - a receipt of incremental changes that show that an individual can do some programming. Granted this is not fool-proof - like all things that are complex, it needs to be evaluated with a suite of other factors and conditions to be determined valid. A website written in a personal voice is one of these factors.

A dark pattern on your self hosted blogging website is to backdate blog posts and make yourself seem very good at predicting future trends.

There is no reason why you have to write a blog over a long period of time, you could quickly pump out several blog posts and link to them to establish credibility quickly.

We need better timestamping services for this.

I tried to write out an initial spec here, but I haven’t been able to write any implementations yet: https://github.com/sebmellen/proof-of-origination.

There's this on the Bitcoin blockchain: https://opentimestamps.org

I guess you can use a third party like archive.org, if the blog is crawled by it, the owner doesn't get them to delete it, and there is no politically motivated revisionism going on based on the archive.org maintainers.

I would be suspicious of a reasonably popular blog claiming to have predicted stuff and not being able to back that up with an archive.org capture (or raw scraper data), though I guess it is somewhere where storing a hash on a blockchain may offer some benefits for edge cases.

> We need better timestamping services for this.

If I were to write a dozen blog posts today, and then straight up dump them on my blog, dating each of them so they're spaced roughly evenly since Jan 2021 to today, and start each of them with a preamble saying "I wrote this in my journal around [backdated timestmap]; publishing it now ([real timestamp]) as part of my 2025 blog revival commitment" - what would you say then? This little preamble explains both the sudden appearance and lack of any prior traces on the Internet corresponding to claimed creation dates. Are you going to call me a liar?

No, if someone with even half a brain wants to fake expertise this way, you won't be able to tell. If anything, what will give them away is anachronisms in text. Like idk. an off-hand remark about ChatGPT in a post dated 2021 could make you wonder.

But you're still a liar. And 'calling you out' isn't a prerequisite to (correctly) suspecting it.

Links submitted to Reddit or HN then a bit work as proofs of the publication date

since one cannot backdate timestamps on Reddit and HN. Hmm but you can still rewrite the content a bit

Yes this only proves you had something on a certain date, but not that the content has been unchanged.

if you're that popular, there should be some history in archive.org or archive.is

If some one is determined to find out the authenticity then it’s possible right? Like Waybackmachine or similar tools?

Lots of plausible deniability

If I find 10 backdated articles appear out of thin air in Waybackmachine I'm not going to ask the author to explain it. It just lowers their credibility in my mind and I move on. I'm not interested in proving to them or in a court of law that they backdated articles.

What if the articles have no date on them at all?

>"Anyone can generate a big portfolio of projects these days"

LOL. I could easily do it "back in those days". The difference is that in my particular case (I specialize in developing new software products for clients) I also have long list of names with actual phone numbers, emails, addresses etc. So anyone can call and verify.

Never blogged. Have no time / desire

I often wonder if work experience on your resume pre-2023 will become a hot commodity for employment in the coming years.

Many people wrote about why it is important to blog, but I never heard of what you just stated about credibility. That's the best and most convincing thing I ever heard. Thank you very much for having shared it here.

It's just self-marketing. Nothing new.

That trivializes it, I think. A ton of what people do related to their jobs is marketing at some level. A lot of people here probably resent marketing and self-promotion (to a certain level) but that's the way the world works. If no one has any idea what you do, either directly or through your manager, guess who is getting the chop if the company cuts back even a little.

That's fine.

I would also argue self-marketing is important when you have lazy or bad managers.

Good managers help but you’re ultimately responsible for your own career/reputation.

I think the key is that its high effort self marketing. Its proving you are willing to put in work which is hard to fake.

If I smell self-marketing, it reduces your credibility to me.

So okay for companies to market their products or services, but not okay for a person to market themselves?

It’s the same for companies when their presentation seems unauthentic (which is often the case).

If it’s good, there’s nothing to smell.

That’s a tautology.

There is nothing "just" about marketing. Whether for you or a company.

>"...way to establish your credibility about different subjects..."

Or the other way around

This is exactly why I started my blog about golf.

I was starting https://golfcourse.wiki and I read a bunch by Jimmy Wales, and he focused on his own credibility and openness being a linchpin to wikipedia.

I thought I might as well start a blog then, because in a world of golf media, with few exceptions is mostly a just corporate funded advertisement-as-entertainment slop. I figured I could at least stand out by openly talking about golf in a very different way, by just writing for me, with my target demo being my best golf friend, who sadly passed about the same time I started the blog.

I've got myself a small audience (a few hundred subscribers, and maybe a fourth of that read regularly. I'm more than happy with that. My ideas are almost diametrically opposed to much of the golf world, but I spend a ton of time on almost all of the articles, and I'm very proud of them. I think it lets people who might use the wiki know how serious I am about the wiki as something good for golf not as some way to get rich. I think it does a good job, and it's a good way to waste a few hours/days/weeks.

I ran a personal blog ~2007-2013, retiring it after one-too-many'a THC-infused evening of personal expression.

Several of my posts received 100k+ views, one with 1M+, typically exploring minor technical hacks. A couple posts resulted in minor sales of bespoke hardware adapters, which was a nice "side hustle" for a few years. None of this would ever had made me rich, but it was a neat introduction to information sharing.

My resumé still lists several articles written about my blogposts, in publications including Wired, Hack-A-Day, &c... although the links obviously haven't worked for over a decade.

I've recently registered a new domain for my next blog attempt, which will mostly just be a record of things I find interesting on that particular day. If you ever read Whole Earth Catalogue, my hope is for my own modern-day version of the excellent WEC-inspired https://kk.org/cooltools/ [not me/mine].

> Several of my posts received 100k+ views, one with 1M+, typically exploring minor technical hacks.

1M+ is definitely no one

You are correct, I am just another "no one" (with a few viral hits).

I could swear this post and your comment were something I already read word for word a few days ago

I noticed this quite well, recently.

The initial reason behind my blog was sharing fun solutions from my work. If I get it approved in a blog post then I can talk about it publicly. Working in game development that's a fairly rare opportunity. I usually share my posts on Reddit for just a handful of nods and a random question or two.

However, I recently had an interview where the interviewers had read my blog and used it as a basis to steer their questions. At that point having put such thought and effort into it felt well worth it. I do believe it's a part of what got me the job.

This is precisely why I am suspicious of most "free" online resources out there. When one writes to establish themselves as a credible source or as authority on a subject, they are flipping the target of the writing. They are making it all about the author, and not the reader/student. This is similar to what happens with academic writing, where using an approachable tone of voice can be seen as hurtful to the author's image of authority. Unfortunately, by the time someone actually tries to learn from this type of resource, a lot of damage is already done.

Academic papers are supposed to be about the author... They're meant to be an author's work put forth to an intended community of "colleagues", not students or general public. No one should think that a general learner is supposed to turn to academic research papers as their main vector of learning content.

I personally never thought academic papers were about the author. They might have turned into an ego game, but I always assumed that the goal of academic writing was to effectively communicate complex ideas and research findings to the reader. If not, then it's no wonder our voices are the first ones the public ignores in a time of crisis.

Writing to teach others is a much more effective way of establishing credibility than writing to just show off.

There is a reason Andrej Karpathy has such a great reputation. His credentials are impressive, but the quality of his teaching content is spectacular.

> Writing on a blog is a very inexpensive way to establish your credibility about different subjects. This pays off later down the line when you can link people to things you've written in the past.

Unfortunately, these days writing a publicly-available blog is also a great way to train AI to replace you at the very job you're establishing credibility in.

Alas, that ship has sailed. So keep writing blogs.