Comment by jerf

The goodness of blogging is not limited to fame. There's having something concrete to show to employers, the practice for communication (probably only becoming more important in an era of LLM code), working ideas out, getting them out of your head, and yeah, sure, also buying that lottery ticket for fame.

I also use it for things I want to post over and over again, so now I can just link a variety of arguments instead of making them again.

However, I would also agree that if one's personal metric is "I want to be famous" that just pounding away at it is a bad use of time. [1] I would also agree that while I consider it a generally good exercise often worth the time to at least some extent that per basic Econ 101, the marginal utility does diminish as your "consumption" of "writing blog posts" increases and I'm not recommending some sort of unlimited blank check be allocated to it because it never stops being worthwhile... of course it does. That's true of anything.

[1] If you do want to be "famous" my suggestion would be 1. Be sure you have something to say; if your blog posts are effectively reproducible via a prompt to an LLM you're not going to rise above the noise 2. Be regular, and as such, be willing to be repetitive. 3. Do a bit of promotion, like posting to HN and other places 4. Once you have a base, don't just lean into it; start trying to get into conference speakerships. The "good" ones are hard but there are many conferences starving for content, slots are not actually that hard to come by. 5. Do a good job with those; see numerous resources on how to give presentations, don't be afraid to do some stuff like Toastmasters and stuff if you need to. 6. Pound away at that. It generally seems more likely to me to work than pushing just from the blog angle. That said, you can't skip step 1. It doesn't have to be "unique" but it does need to be something other than just "Hey, you should, you know, write good code."

(The thing I choked on personally is the "be repetitive" part. Way back in the first couple of years of my site, back when it had a different focus, I did it for a while, but got tired of it relatively quickly. One of the major reasons I write things on my site is precisely so I can link to them and not repeat myself as much. However every majorly successful blog I've even been subscribed to is quite repetitive; the same takes applied to a string of news stories, the same points every couple of weeks... it is what it is, I'm not necessarily criticizing it, it clearly works, but it's not what I wanted. As a result I don't have the regularity sufficient to "break out". Well, that's fine, I'm not really seeking to "break out" anyhow.)