You can establish yourself as something of a global expert on some topic just by writing about it a few times a month over the course of a year!

Don't expect people to come to your blog. Practice https://indieweb.org/POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - post things on your blog and then tweet/toot/linkedin/submit-to-hacker-news/share-in-discord etc.

Also, don't worry too much about whether you get traffic at the time you write something. A lot of the reputational value comes from having written something that you can link people to in the future. "Here are my notes about that topic from last year: LINK" - that kind of thing.

There's a lot to be said for writing for its own sake, too. Just writing about a topic forces you to double-check your understanding and do a little bit more research. It's a fantastic way of learning more about the world even if nobody else ever reads it.

The Apple store and Epson told them to do a clean install so they were very grateful and it made me happy that I could help them. Worth it for me!

I do mention my blog on my resume together with code repositories. It is some kind of portfolio, and it is a good learning experience for me.

I don't think that it is worth "building a brand", unless you want to specialize in building brands. It's not like someone at Google will ever read your blog and offer you a job; if you want to work at Google, learn how to pass their interview process. If you want to be visible on social media, probably you need to follow a ton of people, engage with them, produce a lot of content and the kind of content that people like or repost. This has nothing to do with a personal blog, though.

Another thing is that if you find it worth blogging about, it's probably niche in the first place. If it's common knowledge, it's probably already on Wikipedia, or StackOverflow, or now some LLM (and if you wait long enough, your blog will be part of the LLM, whether you want it or not).

I see it like FOSS: if you do it with the hope that many people will use it, then I think it's a bad idea. Because you work for free and people will never be happy. If you do it for yourself, it's great!

I keep writing (https://taoofmac.com) because:

a) my wiki (looks like a blog, but it is a wiki, roughly 9500 pages of it these days - https://taoofmac.com/static/graph) is a public notepad of sorts, and I often do stuff that is either unique enough to not be documented anywhere or of interest to some technical fields (so many people found me because Google search used to work).

b) I refer to my notes frequently and share them, and it helps if they can be made public, especially when dealing with customers.

c) writing is sort of what I do. I like it, and it greatly benefits my ability to recall things. Every engineer on the planet should know how to write and communicate effectively, simply because explaining things always improves your ability to reason about problems.

That said, it's kind of weird to search for something I need to fix and come across my old self from 5-10 years ago.

That’s not saying writing isn’t important. I don’t think I understand a subject unless I can teach it, explain it and argue both sides about why you should and shouldn’t use it.

If I were going to go into independent consulting as oppose to working for consulting companies, I might start a blog a year ahead of time. But it wouldn’t be for discovery. Leveraging and improving my network would be the first strategy and then direct people to it once they knew me.