100 blog posts, 6 years, 5 million views

Time sure does fly.

This is my 100th blog post! I started blogging regularly in June 2019 and have tried to write at least once a month since then. It pains me greatly when I miss a month...

I have always really, really enjoyed reading technical blogs. People like Matt Might, Eric Lippert, Eli Bendersky, and many more. I'd visit their website once or twice a week hoping for something new. Every night before bed I read a few.

It made me want to write my own. But what would I write about?! Who would care what I have to say? How embarrassing and cringey will my content be? At some point, I convinced myself to just try it. That first post generated immediate buzz with a bunch of comments saying I don't know what I'm talking about (which is true).

It was fun. I kept writing. Now I can't imagine not writing. "Writing is thinking" or so they say. Over these 6 years, the 100 posts have amassed 5 million views and thousands of comments. The most viewed posts are:

1. Challenging projects every programmer should try
2. Challenging algorithms and data structures every programmer should try
3. More challenging projects every programmer should try
4. Lessons from my PhD
5. Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler, part 1
6. The project with a single 11,000-line code file
7. Why I prefer making useless stuff
8. "This project will only take 2 hours"
9. When users never use the features they asked for
10. What a $500,000 grant proposal looks like

By far the most popular is the first Challenging post. Even 5+ years later, it is still being viewed hundreds of times a day. What I find funny is how different the Challenging series is from the rest of my writing, yet those are the ones that perform the best. I'm really bad at predicting which posts will be popular.

A few noteworthy posts stand out in my mind:

• Most time-consuming to write: Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler (series)
• Second most time-consuming to write: Implementing cosine in C from scratch
• Most creative: Hofstadter: An esoteric programming language with concurrency, regex, and web requests
• Favorite coding project: My first superoptimizer
• Best story: Building solutions to problems that no one knows exist yet
• Most comments: The project with a single 11,000-line code file
• Most negative comments: On second thought, let's not revisit those 😊

Anyway, I have many more posts left. Better get to writing.