Programming blogs – Using Medium vs self-hosting with your own website? 🤔

Key Takeaways

hey guys I've got a developer marketing question for you today and it came from Murat on Twitter so Murat asks would writing articles on medium cover such a portfolio would you recommend having your own website and what he's referring to there - there is if you're trying to build up a developer portfolio by writing blog articles writing tutorials that you publish on the internet kind of build up your expertise and demonstrate your knowledge should you do that on a platform like medium that's just a blogging platform where anyone can sign up or should you do that on your own website and I've written a blog article about this topic in the past but I don't think I've ever done a video on this so my thoughts here are I personally would absolutely go self-hosted you know put up your own website there and post your articles to that in the first place like this should be sort of where your articles go and I would maybe republish them at a later point in time - sites like medium or LinkedIn but it would absolutely make your personal portfolio that you're hosting on your own website I would make that the number one channel the number one outlet where you're sharing your stuff and the main reason is that I just don't trust sites like medium tumblr or well I guess LinkedIn if you're running your blog there I don't trust them to be around as blogging platforms for the next 5 or 10 years right and if you're serious about building this kind of portfolio and building up this kind of expertise I would not rely on another third party I mean technically you're always relying on some kind of third party for your hosting and whatnot but if you have control over your own content that is invaluable and I had an experience like that where I was always doing my my blogging and my tutorial writing on my own website kind of completely self hosting that since 2012 and my experience has been that if you do that it opens up so many more opportunities and so many more possibilities for now I'm selling Python training courses through my website if I had blogged or written tutorials and put them on medium I couldn't really do that sure you can put a link in there but you can't really you don't really have the kind of flexibility that you have with your own website right where you can you know you can offer additional things and ask for people's email addresses and give away free stuff and kind of make it a make a like little sidebar ads for your own stuff essentially and you can't really do that with medium because you're 100 percent under the control off the medium platform in any kind of search engine rank that you build up well guess what that points to medium com it doesn't point to your own website and I think that is the biggest downside of hosting your stuff on any of these other platforms so if you're trying to build a developer portfolio and you're trying to to kind of get your name out there and show and demonstrate your expertise I would absolutely go the self-hosted route you know get a domain something like your own name you know first name last name com or something like that that is very generic that's always gonna be a viable option for you to use moving forward and then just start putting your stuff there it's very easy to do that these days you know you can just start out with something like Squarespace which is a hosted blogging platform and you can you can use you could also just use WordPress they also have hosted options or you could host it yourself if you can do that or you can do what I did and just write your blogging platform from scratch and it could be a cool exercise something that you can do in Python and something that can teach you a lot of other skills like web development skills and it would also give you something to blog about on your site right just an idea so yeah don't put your stuff a medium honestly I don't trust them I don't think they will be around in ten years and you will lose all of your content and this is really a long-term game and I think you should always self publish and self host your stuff if you're doing any kind of developer portfolio now if you're talking about code I would put it on github it's kind of the same liability there you know honestly they might disappear as well but I feel like with code it's it's a little easier to migrated and you're not that reliant on the search engine rank and kind of you know having to show up in in search engines so just a couple of thoughts on that yeah I hope this was helpful let me know if you have another question that anything about your career as a software development developing or how to learn Python how to get better at Python I really enjoy talking about this stuff and I'd love to answer your question in a future video so just leave a comment below and I'll try and tackle a question in the future