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Sell yourself, sell your work

(www.solipsys.co.uk)
449 points ColinWright | 1 comments | 25 Mar 25 21:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | source
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simonw ◴[26 Mar 25 03:06 UTC] No.43478469[source]▶
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.

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1. brulard ◴[26 Mar 25 14:11 UTC] No.43482474[source]▶
I like your diligency, thats pretty impressive track record. Although I need to point out a little readability issue: For me (likely ADHD) your blog is very hard to visually parse. It looks like single wall of unstructured text. It's hard to see where one post ends and where another one begins. The strongly emphasized links inside the content itself does not help. You have a lot of whitespace on left and right, but almost none in vertical direction and there is little use of font sizes. In the end every element seems the same importance. I see that you don't want to overdo with styling, which is fine, but a little more styling here and there could go a long way to help people get around.