Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

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By the way, if you're a regular-ol'-geek and wondering "I wonder if writing about technical topics could help me career-wise", the answer is "Absolutely yes."

This is so true. I think the bulk of my consulting work comes to me via my blog - I've put basically no effort into seeking it out. A conversation which happens with some regularity:

Bossish person: "We are having trouble with $MATHY_STUFF. Do we know anyone who can help us with it?"

Codeish person: "I've been following these tutorials on chrisstucchio.com..."

I'll disagree with patrick a bit about "a visual identity distinct..." and formatting, at least for people who never touch the frontend. The people looking for you probably don't care that much.

Here are some fugly blogs of people you'd almost certainly hire:

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/08/21/random-inequalities... http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts.html http://elem.com/~btilly/ab-testing-multiple-looks/part1-rigo...

That said, dropping $1000 on some pretty visual design probably can't hurt.

I think you're right about appearances, but design isn't the core of Patrick's point. If you called your posts "short tutorials" and had a little section on your site that listed your "short tutorials", your work would probably get cited more, and do a better job of marketing your services.

In particular, some clients will eyeball your list of short tutorials, and see "A/B Testing", "HFT Algorithms", and "Ad Placement Optimization" and immediately form positive associations that they won't by paging through your old blog posts, which is something I just had to do to write this paragraph that very few casual readers will actually do.

You write something, you think it has lasting value, you should say so. It's a corollary of "ask for the sale".

I've been planning to build that anyway, simply because some people tell me they've read articles 1 and 3 on a topic, but missed 2 (and 2 would have been useful). It's just harder to motivate myself to reformat my blog than to try out the Julia language. But it'll be useful to people, so I will do it eventually.

You are misunderstanding one thing, however. People don't google "chris stucchio" and then find the tutorials - I think that's the use case you are discussing. They google "python monte carlo simulation" and find a tutorial in blog post format. They learn that I exist if they pay attention to the URL.

I agree with what you said but these blogs are not ugly. In fact I think stephen's blog is pretty good looking.

"Fugly" was probably overstating things - you need to do something non-default to be ugly. Stephen Diehl is default bootstrap. Ben Tilly has no CSS file.

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