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You don't need a personal website (and why I no longer have one)

Kathryn DiPippo on October 16, 2021

I often tell the story of how a simple website made me fall in love with programming. I was given a brief training assignment to build a website fr...
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Thomas Broyer

Having a personal website is mostly about owning your content.

In case Dev.to moves in a direction you don't like and you'd want to move your content elsewhere, all your previous links (and cross links from other sites) would be dead; and this assumes you'd still be able to easily retrieve your content out of Dev.to (unless you keep a copy of all your content somewhere else already)

If you have a personal website with its own domain name, you can technically move your hosting at any time. Let's say you're using a simple Jekyll blog on GitHub Pages; you want to "protest" some GitHub decision and chose to move to Gitlab, you can do it without any service disruption: setup the same web site on Gitlab Pages, change your DNS, you're all set (OK, this doesn't apply to comments, this is much trickier; I personally chose to crosspost to Dev.to and have my comments there, but my personal website stays my canonical URL; I don't really care if I lose the comments, if some have a big interest, I should extract them into edits to the articles, or new articles altogether).

It's OK to use GitHub as your portfolio and LinkedIn as your resume, as long as you link to them from a web page at your own domain name (it's OK in this case because people likely won't bookmark your portfolio or your resume; it's different for articles where direct links are much more likely and you wouldn't want to break them)

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Kathryn DiPippo

Good point! I was not considering the merits of hosting a website from the point of view of preserving the traceability of your content. Definitely worthwhile to pursue a website if the purpose extends beyond an online portfolio for job applications to one where you want to grow an online presence or just for greater control over your decisions/support. Thanks for the comment!

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khoinguyenkc • Edited

Yeah I think the biggest benefit of having a site is for owning your media, and from there, growing a subscriber list and things of that sort.

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Gustavo Carvalho Silva

Interesting, a agree with you. A year ago I was planning to create a portfolio site, but then I thought "what I will put on there?", and then I noticed that LinkedIn and GitHub was more than the sufficient for me

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Tarinss • Edited

In my humble opinion, we need a professional development company in order to avoid issues related to perfectionism. We'll always want to update the website and it never gets perfect, though...

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Gordan Cuic

Thank you for writing this! I actually might follow on your advice. I started to work on my perosnal web page 10 times, and never been able to finish it for the same reasons you mentioned - it's just never good enough

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Kathryn DiPippo

Glad what I wrote resonated! I hope you're still able to use the work that you spent on your WIP personal site for something else. Maybe the distance from making it your portfolio will help to work toward a sense of completion. And if not, hope the skills you learned transfer to other projects ^u^

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Scott

Awesome article. I think personal sites are good as a sandbox to test new tech out,. play with patterns etc. But like you said....big time sync and depends what youre optimizing for.

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Kathryn DiPippo

Totally agree! My first iterations with my personal site also included a handful of neat one-off toy websites that I eventually migrated into a separate "Web Development Sandbox" repo.

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Yoshi

@pepperwood I’m glad I read your article. I’ve been thinking about this in the back of my mind for some time. Thank you for sharing!

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Kathryn DiPippo

Glad you found it useful!

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Sonny Brown

Interesting. I might follow your direction here.