Sell yourself, sell your work

I have a personal rule which has worked really well for me: if I do a project, the price of doing that project is that I have to write about it.

Back when Twitter threads didn't suck (they could be viewed by people without Twitter accounts) I'd use those - tweet a description of my project with a link, then follow it with a few photos and screenshots.

These days I use my blog, with my "projects" tag: https://simonwillison.net/tags/projects/

I blog all sorts of other stuff, but if I was ever to trim back the one thing I'd keep doing is projects. If you make a thing, write about that thing. I wrote more about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/#pro...

Projects with a GitHub repository make this even easier: describe the project in the README and drop in a few screenshots - that's all you need.

(Screenshots are important though, they're the ultimate defense against bitrot.)

I have many projects from earlier in my career that I never documented or captured in screenshot form and I deeply regret it.

I would love to do this as well, but I'm put off by the time it would take away from pushing the project itself forward. How much time does it generally take for you to make a blogpost for a project?

It can be as little as 10 minutes for smaller projects, partly because I have so much practice writing them up now.

Here are two recent examples where I mostly just quoted my release notes and added a tiny bit of extra flavor:

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/28/strip-tags/

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/19/files-to-prompt/