Personal site or no?

[Dani]

Is the age of personal blogs and portfolio sites dead? Should devs still build one? I feel like blogs went the way of the do-do bird with ChatGPT spitting out blog content left and right, and a combination of LinkedIn and Github suffices for a portfolio these days, no?

Just thought I'd see if I can get a discussion going on the topic :)

[SCBWV]

Interesting question. I don't think personal blogs or sites get much traction these days, unless your famous, and even then it's probably hosted somewhere else.

[trcooke]

I think personal websites are valuable for developers, particularly ones who are self employed and work gig to gig, as it's a good place to present information about yourself, your skills, past projects etc etc in a way that suits you rather than in the form of whatever other service you choose to use such as LinkedIn and the like.

Personal websites also have an authenticity about them. The socials are full of fake and false users posting all kinds of random crap for various purposes, but if you go to my website you know everything that is there has been put there deliberately by me for the purposes of representing me.

The reach of your personal website will also roughly reflect the reach you have in the industry already. If you're focused on operating in your local area then that'll probably be your site audience too, but if you're a global programming superstar then your audience will reflect that. Sometimes I think folks get hung up on how many visitors they get to their site as reflected by the plentiful posts on this forum about SEO and "how to achieve top global search engine rankings for my estate agency in a small town". Sometimes you don't need to be top of Google to get value from your site.