03 — Public Signal and Blog¶

Capabilities without signal do not convert into offers. The engineers who get hired at the level they deserve are the ones who make their work legible to people who cannot read code. This file is the signal machine: your blog, your social presence, and the specific communities where posting matters. It is not marketing fluff; it is the compounding interest of Phase 7.

The one non-negotiable: your own domain¶

Rent yourname.dev or yourname.engineer or similar. Do it in W45. Do not put your career-defining posts on Medium, Substack, or dev.to as their primary home — those platforms own your traffic, your SEO, and your comment section. Own the domain.

Registrar 2026: Cloudflare Registrar (at-cost pricing, strong DNS, no upsells) or Porkbun (also cheap, decent UX) are the two rational picks. Avoid GoDaddy and Namecheap for career-critical domains — both have gotchas around WHOIS privacy and transfer holds.

Static site generator: pick and forget¶

SSG	2026 status	Pick if
Hugo	Rock-solid, Go binary, extremely fast builds	You want lowest maintenance, Go binary + one theme
Astro	The 2026 favorite for tech blogs w/ interactivity	You want React/Vue/Svelte islands and MDX
Zola	Rust-based Hugo alternative, single binary	You like Rust and small dependencies
Next.js	Overkill for a blog; consider only if you already know it	You want SSR/ISR
Jekyll	Aging. Still works on GitHub Pages	You have prior investment

For Phase 7, Astro is the recommendation. Rich theme ecosystem, easy MDX for embedding interactive diagrams (worth it for the profiling and benchmarks posts), fast builds, deploy free on Cloudflare Pages or Vercel. If you want to spend zero time on frontend, Hugo with the PaperMod theme is the boring correct answer.

Do not fight the frontend for more than two evenings total. Pick, deploy, write.

Post cadence for Phase 7 (M11–M13)¶

Four posts, minimum. All tied to concrete artifacts. Never write generic tutorials — they are content-farm bait and signal nothing about you.

Week	Post	Anchor
W44 (end of P6)	Profiling case study — the P6.3 blog post	Real before/after flamegraphs from your P6.1
W50–51	Building MiniServe	Capstone Alpha launch
W53–54	pyfast_ann: writing a vector index in C++ and shipping to PyPI	Capstone Beta launch
W55–56	Bonus. Pick one: “async gRPC C++ in 2026: what actually works,” or “nanobind vs pybind11 for a real library,” or “my 13-month C++ journey”	Any — something you can write in a weekend

Each post: 900–1800 words. 3–6 images. Longer than that and readers drop; shorter and you look thin.

The formula for a portfolio-anchored post¶

Every post follows this structure. It is not creative; it is what works.

The one-sentence pitch. What you built. What it does. What number is the headline.
The problem. Why the existing options were unsatisfying (for you).
The design. Not the code. The decisions.
The interesting part. One deep dive on one non-obvious thing you did.
The numbers. Table or chart. With methodology paragraph.
The surprises. What you were wrong about. This is the paragraph readers remember. It signals honest engineering.
What is next. Two or three follow-ups. Shows vision without over-promising.

The deliberate self-critical section (“the surprises”) is worth more than the rest of the post combined. Anyone can list what they built. Very few candidates will publicly write “I thought X was the bottleneck; it was actually Y.” That paragraph earns trust that no study can replicate.

Social layer 2026¶

The landscape is fragmented; you must post to multiple places. Pick one primary, cross-post to the others.

Platform	2026 role for a C++/ML engineer	Effort
LinkedIn	The #1 channel where hiring signal lives. Recruiters live here. Post here first.	Medium
X / Twitter	Still has C++ + ML technical audience, plus “buildinpublic” community. Reach is unpredictable but non-zero.	Low (repost/link)
BlueSky	Growing tech audience, especially post-2024 migrations. Worth cross-posting.	Very low
Mastodon (fosstodon.org / hachyderm.io)	Still the home of many senior C++ / systems engineers	Low
Hacker News	Massive one-shot reach when a post hits. Not for follows.	One submission per post
r/cpp	Concentrated C++ audience. Saturday Show-Off threads are the standard channel.	Weekly participation
r/MachineLearning	Only for Beta-shaped posts. Very strict; be technical.	Occasional

For your positioning — India-based applied ML/C++ engineer aiming at global roles — LinkedIn is the primary channel. Post there first, cross-link to your blog. Twitter and BlueSky are secondary. Do not spread thin across five networks; two is the max you can sustain.

The LinkedIn post format that works for capstones¶

[hook line — one sentence with the headline number]

[2-3 short paragraphs on what you built and why]

[bullet list of the interesting technical choices]

[link to the blog post OR the repo, not both — pick one CTA]

[tag people who helped you if any]

Post timing: Tuesday–Thursday, 8–10am IST. Post as text-first (no link previews eat reach) with the link in the first comment. This is a LinkedIn algorithm quirk that has held for years; verify current best practices when you post.

r/cpp Show-Off Saturday¶

Every Saturday, r/cpp has a self-promotion thread. It is the accepted place to plug your project. Rules:

One project per thread.
Post the GitHub link and one paragraph of what it is.
Reply to every comment. This is where the community judges seriousness.
Do not post the same project twice in successive Saturdays. Space it out or focus on a different angle.

Good posts get 10–50 upvotes and a handful of comments. That is a fine outcome — the value is the direct GitHub traffic and the two or three engineers who genuinely engage.

HN Show HN¶

One shot per project. Get it right.

Format: title “Show HN: MiniServe – [10-word description with the number]”. First comment is you introducing yourself and the project (this is the norm).
Timing: Tuesday or Wednesday, 8–10am US Eastern (18:00–20:00 IST). The overnight-to-morning US window catches the day’s biggest audience.
Preparation: README polished, README polished, README polished. HN readers open the GitHub link first, blog second. If the README does not hook them, the post dies.
Response: stay on the thread for the first 4 hours. Reply to every comment, including hostile ones (especially hostile ones — civil defense of your design choices is watched and respected).

A Show HN that lands on the front page will drive 5,000–20,000 blog visits in 24 hours. A Show HN that does not land will drive 50. Both are fine. Do not measure your worth by HN placement.

What to never post¶

study experiences with company names. Even positive ones. Legal risk, and recruiters penalize you.
Long negative rants about specific tools or communities. Punching down never converts.
AI-generated posts you did not edit. Readers can tell in 2026. Instant credibility loss.
Screenshots of code with typos. Take an extra 60 seconds.
“I am looking for a job” posts unattached to any artifact. Instead, post the artifact and let interested parties DM you.

What most people get wrong¶

Posting once, waiting for it to change their life. Signal compounds over 6–12 months of consistent posting. Post 4 times as this phase requires and do not check follower counts.
Writing 4000-word posts. Almost nobody finishes them. 900–1500 is the sweet spot.
Not putting the number in the headline. “I built a service” is invisible. “I built a C++ ML inference server that is 4x faster than FastAPI+PyTorch” gets clicked.
Missing the trailing 6 months. Phase 7 ends at M13, but the signal you built keeps working. Keep posting after you land the first offer — second and third offers are how you negotiate.