I am thinking ahead to what I want to achieve over the next 10 years.
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.
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.
As part of this I am thinking of doing a mix of blogging, some presentations at local groups, and maybe some "self published" 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 'gap in the market' there I could hopefully explain them better.
I wanted to see if anyone has had any success blogging where success could mean:
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 'head hunted' as a result.
I'm interested in all experiences .NET or otherwise!
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.
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
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
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
Project repo: 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.
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/
[2]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston?tab=a...