That is a fair perspective, but I think it is all about how you present your work. I do not agree that open source development is not regarded as worthy in today’s academia. It is not regarded as the only worth, but nowadays it is clear that having open source contributions matters positively in academia. Still not as positively as papers, but definitely positively.
I can offer a counter-argument that may make you reconsider:
It’s true that contributing to an existing piece of work means you are not contributing to your own name. However, by contributing to an existing piece, you become part of this piece. Let’s say that 10,000 users (which is thankfully by now a measurable number) use packages A,B,C and you have become a significant contributor to these three packages by doing lots of pull requests. You cannot claim that these packages are your work but you can claim that you have provided accessibility and improved them in a meaningful way. You can also prove collaboration skills as well in this way, as if you contribute often people get to know you and can vouch for you.
The alternative way is that you do not become part of these packages but you have your own blogpost. First, how do you establish the impact of this blogpost? I guess you could measure the readership, but it is not as concrete as package usage. But in any case, it is unlikely that the readership of a blogpost about a package would be higher than the users of the package itself, so in the numbers game you will be at a loss. In this path, people also get to know you, but it would be hard to vouch for you, because here the people that get to know you are front-end users, while in the previous scenario they are the developers, and therefore their “vouching” counts more when it comes to evaluation.
So, the question is, what would you value more in an imaginary application of your self to your self:
- I have written my own blog posts
- I am part of something larger
To put it in an academic allegory, which one would you value more:
- I’ve written my own papers without co-authors but with few citations
- I am part of papers with a handful of co-authors but with a lot of citations
You can argue for advantage of either, so I really think it is up to how you present your work. If I’d present documentation improvements I would say “I had a lasting impact on the quality and accessibility of a software by directly improving its documentation (which is the starting point for most users). This way I also learned to work with the core dev team.” which for me personally is a stronger statement than “I have a clear knowledge of a software and I can share this knowledge with others that may come across my blog”.
I think it is a good idea to add the same timestamps in the examples of a documentation, if you could foresee that they may break in the future. I haven’t done it so far, but now that you mention it, I definitely should. Or perhaps I could use Documenter.jl/Literate.jl to put an automatic stamp of when the code was run last.