Sell yourself, sell your work

"What if everyone blogged about their work? As in literally everyone."

That would be great. This isn't a zero sum game - what's important is that each individual has an opportunity to document their work, look back on it in the future and occasionally show it to interested people.

Do you have examples of how it helped?

I'm regularly kicking myself for not doing that, so I see the value, but some concrete examples might help my motivation.

I'd suggest a smaller scope, as writing for a whole year can be a bit of a daunting task.

My Substack newsletter is literally a copy and paste from my blog - I built a custom tool for it: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/

Everything substantial I write goes on my blog.

The one challenge I'm having at the moment is where to put short "thoughts" that aren't accompanied by a link. I used to use Twitter for those, but now I'm cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon and Twitter - but cross-posting a "thought" doesn't feel great.

Things like this: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lko5bg3c4s2...

I may have to invent a fourth content type for my blog (which is currently just entries, bookmarks or quotes) for this kind of very-short-form post with no link. Molly White started doing that recently so I may borrow her design: https://www.mollywhite.net/micro

This gets much easier with practice. One exercise that that worked for me was to force myself to share anything (projects, til, ideas, experiments, advice) daily for 111 days. Then scale down.

Compare untested.sonnet.io and sonnet.io/projects

The latter took 10 years to have a list of projects. With the former, there’s almost no friction, although I have spikes and slower periods.

Also, people appreciate people who share and talk about their work, and that can lower the bar for things like correct grammar/vocab/clear structure.

To improve my overall fluency I made a writing tool that separates editing from writing: enso.sonnet.io.

Another thing that can work well are weekly updates/summaries. But this gets harder if you struggle with building habits and prefer shorter feedback loops.

PS. I'm not at Simon's level here although he is one of my inspirations - my main untested feed posts take 1-2 hours minimum, the smaller notes/branches can be < 20 min.

PPS. I'm working on a short list of actionable tips / places to share work. Hit me up via email and I'll send it over when it's done.

Five paragraphs, about an hour or less. Don't overthink it. Below are some examples from my woodworking, but I think they illustrate the concept. The important thing to remember is the blog post is not the project: it is a very quick overview pointing readers to the project. Built up over time, these quick overviews add up to a longer representation of your body of work, which you can use to sell yourself.

https://www.aechairs.com/2025/01/15/black-side-chair/

https://www.aechairs.com/2024/10/15/painting-chairs-with-mil...

It can be as little as 10 minutes for smaller projects, partly because I have so much practice writing them up now.

Here are two recent examples where I mostly just quoted my release notes and added a tiny bit of extra flavor:

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/28/strip-tags/

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/19/files-to-prompt/

> But it feels like much scaffolding needs to occur for an audience to see the light.

tl;dr: Don't think about others. Just write, put it out there, with a couple of stickers pointing people. They'll see and come.

I'd not care about scaffolding, actually. I have three main outlets for what I do: Blog, Digital Garden, Mastodon, and arguably here.

Blog was meant to be technical, but instead it became a "life" blog. My digital garden is where my technical notes are, and where my project write-ups will be, and Mastodon and here is what I post links to these spaces.

My secret is, I don't write these for anybody. The format is for general consumption, but I'm not sad because nobody gives feedback about it or reaches me about these things. I generally do these for my enjoyment, and blog analytics show that there's some foot traffic in my blog. Digital garden keeps no analytics.

When you put it out there, can point people to what you do, people will start to come. Not in hoards, but in small groups, and that's enough IMHO. Otherwise you need to be your blog's servant to drive the numbers up.

I'm not playing that game.

It's https://datasette.io - I'm still having so much fun with it, especially since any idea I want to experiment with can be justified as a Datasette plugin!

I can see it from this perspective, thank you

I took it from Byun-Chul Han's "What is Power?". It's quite a heavy philosophy book, but worth reading if you are into this stuff.

Writing that answer in this thread, made me think that I should publish too. So, I did: https://rlupi.com/speak-up-publish-seize-your-power

The last part was beautifully put; it'll definitely stick with me awhile.

I think the unique perspective part is something I’m understanding. It’s easy to read or see other people’s work and think you don’t have anything to add

It definitely heavily implies that creators are - or should be - trying to benefit the wider world.

For me the title

> Sell yourself, sell your work

is off-putting. It makes it sound like my work should become a product to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. But not everything can become a product and not everyone wants to be creating products all day, every day. Especially since once something becomes a product, the focus is on profit and no longer the actual idea - profit begins to drive development of that idea.

But then I read the article and realised that the title has nothing to do with the message:

> "Selling" to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, "Yes, that was good."

The author, IMHO, is talking of promotion and not selling. Which is fair enough.

Without promotion, your ideas won't reach a broader audience. But that may be fine for some people and sometimes for me. I choose not to promote my half-baked ideas - fine. That's a different feeling than to think that I can't sell my ideas or that I've wasted my time because I won't be making a profit.

Of course, "selling yourself" and "promoting yourself" is the same thing in some places on this planet, for me though, there is a fine line between the two.

On a side note, whatever happened to hobbies? Whatever happens to exploring and experimenting with ideas? If everything I do has to eventually turn a profit then I need reconsider how often I go to the toilet - is that a profitable activity?

Naturally not everyone is lucky enough to have the income to do this.

The first part though is key - living within your means. It assumes you have means, and that it's possible to live within them.

The advice is good - whether you use it or not is up to you, and of no consequence to the advice giver. Whether you are in a position to take the advice or not is up to you.

For those who can though I can agree with it. Forgoing a new car now might mean retiring a year earlier. Financial freedom (aka retirement) means doing work on your terms, not beholden to your employer. It doesn't mean "not working".

Of course the best way to a better job, more pay, and a sooner retirement is indeed to "sell yourself" making both yourself and your work more valuable.

Do this advice is a corollary to the article, not a repudiation of it.

I think you might modify the advice to be something like:

If you're a programmer, and you're paid well, don't assume that will last forever. Don't spend all your money (and beyond) on cars and rent. Invest as much as you can with the goal of being financially independent.

Programmers tend to be paid well?

Respectfully disagree. If you're maxing out your spend so at the end of the month there is no surplus you aren't living within your means. For a lot of folks this is an ugly necessity, but programmers generally aren't in this group.

I actually enjoy when my work isn't just fun and good, but also contributing to a bigger picture. It's bot just that it gives meaning. It's also that the added design constraints are intriguing, and help me determine when I can stop polishing.

It's not about self promotion, but building with a clear goal set fir me I have found to be much more rewarding than when I have to think of my own goal. The worst is when a fake goal is set, it's the thing about university I liked the least. If I can't interrogate or question the 'why' for the goal, because it is just 'to test me' then it isn't a real goal, just an artificial constraint.

Plus, am I the only one who is disgusted by the idea of Shell/Exxon/... using OSS in their operations?

Sharing technically-excellent software with parasites seems to be a net negative for the world, because many people are just takers who will ruin the world to make themselves a few more dollars.

OTOH, I love for regular people to have free quality SW to use for their lives.

How to strike the balance?

Survivorship bias at its finest. For as many people have been lived before ourselves there’s only a handful that get remembered on any scale.

Van Goughs work is only popular now because after his death his sister in law. [1]. She spent her life promoting and selling his work. And it took decades to do. Without her, his work would average simply disappeared.

Van Gough of course didn't sell his work. He lived in poverty (by choice I guess) and got whatever satisfaction he needed simply by painting them. (Now There's a rabbit hole to go down, given the nature of his death, which I'll avoid.)

So if you're hoping your work will be discovered by "the world " while you live in obscurity, then I'm not sure Van Gogh is an example you should emulate.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_van_Gogh-Bonger