This is a meta post, but it’s been 100 days since I started blogging every day. I wanted to celebrate! And I just wanted to note some lessons.
When you blog every day, it doesn’t have to be as good
Before I started the streak, I blogged at least once a month for the previous year or two. During that time, I often spent a lot of time working on my blog post. Not necessarily days, but hours. This was, after all, the only blog post I was writing, so it needed to be really good. But once I committed to writing once a day, I was focused on getting something out. I still wanted to be proud of it, but there wasn’t as much pressure. It could even be something really short, or just a pointer to a different piece that I thought was interesting (like here or here).
Having a streak forces your hand
A streak makes you make time. There were definitely times when it was after dinner and I still hadn’t blogged. If I wasn’t trying to keep a streak going, I’d have skipped that day.
Opinion pieces are easier to write than technical pieces
It was easier (and more popular) to write a piece on the nature of the CTO/co-founder or what a senior engineer is than it was on an interesting rails gem like after_party or the nuances of Stripe Connect integration. Interviews were the easiest post to write, but required a bit more planning.
More content means more readers, but mostly from one offs
In the months before December, I averaged about 4200 visits/month. In the months after, I averaged about 6300, but most of the elevated traffic came on specific days from referral traffic due to posts I had made to Hacker News. Still, the increase in traffic was about 7% even for months when I didn’t have a post that “went viral”
I feel so lucky to have a place to spout off. Thanks for reading.