Comment by marginalia_nu

In 2021 I started blogging, mostly wrote about what I was thinking and building, mostly because I enjoy writing and had too much spare time during the pandemic. Didn't really advertise the blog or anything, but people found it and started sharing it on among other places, HN. I don't run ads or anything like that, the blog is 100% a vector for people to discover my work.

As a direct consequence of this choice, I've been able to quit my job and live off building stuff and posting about it online. If I had not started the blog, this would not have happened. I would still have toiled away in anonymity at my job.

Is this guaranteed to happen to everyone who starts a blog? Of course not, that would be a ridiculous claim, I've had blogs before that went nowhere too, mostly because I didn't really have anything interesting to write. Though it does keep happening to a lot of people, eventually myself included.

I'm a big believer in the concept of luck surface area as an explanatory model. The probability of getting lucky is the product of how much you are doing and how much you are talking about it. Maximizing this area maximizes the likelihood of positive career outcomes.

Though I don't think it has to be blogging in particular. Blogging works for me because I enjoy writing. Someone else might do better on youtube, in local tech user groups, in the conference circuit, or even just networking a lot and talking to your friends about your work.

Sticking with it is sort of good advice however, as these things are heavily momentum based. Discovery often takes time, but the more people who discover your content, the more it gets shared, and the more people will discover it. This is generally true in any medium.

Though again, the key is to find something you enjoy. If it feels like a chore, it's unlikely you'll stick with it.