I personally blog for the same reason some people play the guitar: I don't care whether what I produce is good or not, or whether people like the articles I write or not.
It's just a hobby.
Even my girlfriend doesn't read my posts if I'm to be honest. But the act of writing soothes me, and as a non-native English speaker I feel it's been a great way to improve on my written English.
Also, writing your own static site generator is a pretty fun (and easy) thing to do.
If anything, I have found my own disability to be a huge plus when looking for a new job. I'm one of these job hoppers and it's been almost 10 years since I have stayed over 3 years within the same company. Coincidentally, I was diagnosed with some condition that I won't name here about 10 years ago.
Now, this is solely based on my own experience, which of course might not apply to your specific field of work and disability type.
What I mean is, most large companies have a voluntary self-identification form at the end of their job application. And I tend to get a lot more responses when applying for roles where I am invited to disclose my disability.
On a funny note, recruiters always want to confirm that I indeed have a disability, but they can't just reach out and ask "hey dude you sure you didn't click on that button by mistake?".
Instead, they always send this very P.C. email that reads like "Here at [insert company name] we pride ourselves on bein inclusive and bla bla bla. You informed us that you had disability, and we want to make sure that we can accommodate you and make you feel welcome. If you need any special arrangement, please let us know".
To which my response is always "Yes I do have this thing, and no I'm fine thanks".
My disability has fucked up a lot of things in my life, but it's boosted my career.
My workmates and I got laid off by our employer (a FAANG company) last summer and I spent 4 months looking for a job (in Ireland). I started using a simple spreadsheet to keep track of all the jobs you apply for: company name, job title, salary, url, outcome (ghosted / rejected / interview).
Over those 4 months I applied for a total of 87 roles for data scientist / analytics engineer. Outcome:
That breakdown was consistent across all my former workmates (between 50 to 100 applications before signing a contract), which is largely due to mass layoffs / high competition in the tech sector
Being ghosted is the norm (more on that later)
Avoid recruitment agencies at all cost. Here, they will ghost you for the jobs you apply for, and will then start contacting you for roles you're overqualified for (internships, etc..)
What we realised after a while, from chatting with folks who work in the recruitment field is that if you start getting loads of templated rejection email a few days / weeks after applying for roles, this means that nobody ever read your resume.
Each role we apply for usually receive 100+ applications, and that the recruiter who posted the role is also hiring for a network engineer, a janitor, two junior data analysts, a marketing consultant, a senior project manager, etc..
In other words, they're going to receive several hundreds of resumes, and they won't be able to read all of them. Actually, they'll only read 10 resumes for each role, as is the norm in modern HR.
It seems that most recruiters these days use ATS software to do all of the work for them. Here in Ireland the top ones are "Lever ATS" or "Recruiterbox ATS". Depending on the keywords that the recruiter enters, each resume gets a score. The recruiter then proceeds to open the top 10 applications only, and clicks on a button that sends a templated rejection email to all the unfortunate candidates that didn't make the cut.
Though recruiters usually try and become experts in a specific area ("I'm a tech recruiter", "I'm a recruiter that specialises in finance"), they actually know very little about the jobs that they hire for.
The truth is, 99% of the time, the reason why we get rejected isn't because we're not a good fit for the role. It's because we failed to pass the ATS software filtering process.
I'm a big fan of your work, and as I've learnt a lot from reading your blog posts over the years, I'd be curious to know a bit more about typical use cases for wanting to work with Observable notebooks.
The only reason why I'm using A JavaScript notebook tool (Starboard.gg) is to be able to access cool visualisation packages like Anychart or Highcharts.
Given the hype around Observable notebooks, I feel that I'm missing something.
What makes you decide to start something in an Observable notebook rather than in Jupyter?
A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later.
Congrats OP on launching this, looking forward to dive further in! It's great to see people experimenting in the Reactive + Live Programming space as like you mention, I think it can bring a lot of improvements to how we build software. Did you run into any limitations adopting this model?
> A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later
The code you write is pure Typescript (instead of sth custom like ObservableJS) which opens more paths to interoperability (aside from having a public URL). For example, I'm now working to make the code instantly exportable so you can mix it directly into existing codebases (or deploy on your own hosting / Vercel / whatever you prefer).
I second to this. There's often a huge difference between the languages and tools we'd love to be using, and those that we are allowed / forced to use on the workplace.
I for instance just moved to a company where the data stack is basically OracleSQL and R. And I dislike both. But as _Wintermute pointed out, a whole company / department won't change their entire tech stack just to please one person.
Here's my modest contribution:
https://blanchardjulien.com/
https://javascriptfordatascience.com
Your feedback is more than welcome!
(Oh and here's "Loulou",my static site generator: https://github.com/julien-blanchard/Loulou)