This only works if your site has something to do with development.
Or are you suggesting posting development related topics to a non development related site purely to get those juicy backlinks (and thus good pagerank)?
Even though I'd say that he could have done a better job at integrating it on his website (it looks too much like an isolated page in my opinion - there should be a "Tips for developers" section), it does the job at attracting links and boosting SEO for his main site (also with A/Bingo, a software package he developed: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo).
That's sort of what I mean.
For my work I build and run a number of websites which are almost completely unrelated to tech. These are service industry websites so there is no "product" to speak of.
I am looking for ways to improve pagerank, so let's say I was to write a few pages about how I built some of the trickier parts of these websites and hosted these on the websites themselves but perhaps did not link these through from the main pages (but did link back to the main pages from my new pages).
If I got links to my articles on reddit , HN etc then perhaps this would improve pagerank even though the pages are unrelated to the sites main content. So this would improve the search rankings for the websites on their main keywords as well?
Yeah, that's the idea. However personnally I would link from the home page ("Inside the business" chronicles). It doesn't have to be a big link, could be in the footer for example. I don't have metrics for that but I think pages that are not linked from anywhere on your website might look a bit shady in Google's eyes.
By getting links to your articles you'd improve overall authority of your site (also important to link back to your homepage and other important pages in order to drive PR back, as you point out).
By improving your website's authority you'll rank better for your main keywords as well.
Or are you suggesting posting development related topics to a non development related site purely to get those juicy backlinks (and thus good pagerank)?