Why Developer Advocates Should First Publish Content on a Personal Blog

In a blog post Where to publish content? I shared why I recommend to publish on your own blog first:

1. It allows you to build your portfolio and keep all your work in one place
2. It allows to build your personal brand
3. It can act as your “second” resume as it shows that you actually published. It’s easy to put anything on a resume. A blog shows the actual work. GitHub is a resume for your code. A blog is a resume for your thoughts.
4. When you get a new job, the content you published will be available on your personal blog and not on the company’s blog
5. If something happens to other sites (no longer available, site offline, put behind a paywall), you still have the content on a personal blog

After you publish on your own blog, it can be a good idea to republish or syndicate on to other platform such as Dev.to, LinkedIn, Hashnode and others.

I was reading a blog post from Stephanie Morillo Why Developers Should Archive Their Old Content where Stephanie talks about the importance of archiving your work because of a situation like this:

Felix Salmon

@felixsalmon

It looks like @Reuters has just vaporized all of its old blog content, including many years of my work, with no warning.

18:35 PM - 04 May 2021

Now, Felix Salmon is a journalist so the idea of first publishing on personal blog and then republishing is not an option. But for Developer Advocates these guidelines are usually a lot more relaxed. You usually have a lot more freedom to decide where to publish first.

If you read the tweet thread, it looks like the articles are back online. But, I still believe is a good example that anything you publish on someone else website, it can disappear, placed behind a paywall or anything else.

So my advice for Developer Advocates: start a blog, publish there first, and then republish where makes sense.