On 1 million page views — Jack Vanlightly

On 1 million page views

I just read Phil Eaton’s post on reaching the 1 million page views milestone, which he was inspired to blog about due to Murat Demirbas doing the same thing back in 2017.

I just checked my all time blog stats and it turns out I can write one of these too 😄

My all-time most read blog post is RabbitMQ vs Kafka Part 1 - Two Different Takes on Messaging from 2017 with 132K views. As you can see from the monthly stats, my traffic has not followed a compounding growth. Traffic peaked in 2018-2019 when I was targeting a larger audience of enterprise developers with RabbitMQ and Kafka content. It ebbed a lot 2020-2023, because I wrote way less often and about more niche topics (distributed systems and TLA+). It’s picked up more recently because I am writing regularly again and sometimes for a broader audience.

I’ve already written about why I write a blog (and other stuff about writing in general) so I won’t repeat that here:

How my blog tech hasn’t evolved… at all 😆

My blog tooling has not evolved at all because I am too lazy. Squarespace has worked fine and I’ve never experienced an issue. I’m not someone that enjoys self-hosting. I want the easy button.

That said, it does have some limitations, such as poor code support (so I embed Gists which works great), doesn’t support tables (so I use markdown tables) and I can’t paste an image into the editor (my biggest frustration with Squarespace!).

I might be tempted to change, but I have really fun and interesting things on my todo list.

Some advice

…as someone who blogs for fun, not profit, which is a different game entirely.

You do you.

But for what it's worth, my strategy is the following:

  • Enjoy the writing process by writing about stuff I like and find interesting.

  • I often write about stuff I want to learn about (for example I had zero knowledge of table format internals at the beginning of 2024 and wanted to fix that).

  • Set a high bar — no one wants to be called out for writing low-quality BS.

  • I have peers review my more ambitious or potentially contentious work.

  • Be authentic.

  • I avoid listicles and anything that resembles that kind of thing like the plague. I think those kinds of posts tend to erode credibility and authority of voice in the long term.

Also set some expectations:

  • Traffic will likely start low. After one year (and 27 posts) I still basically had no traffic.

  • Traffic may ebb and flow.

  • Impact is really hard to measure. Don’t sweat it too much.

On AI

Someone asked me recently about the impact of AI on writing. Would I carry on as the models are getting so good at it? The answer is yes of course. Yes because as I have said many times, I benefit the most from the process of writing. Even if AI gets to the point that it can write posts like my recent blog post on symmetry in TLA+ (which involved me writing and running some specs, running GraphViz to create state space graphs) I hope I’ll still be writing.

Here’s to the future

Tech blogs, especially niche or non-beginner ones, rarely generate massive traffic. After 8 years, I hit 1.5M page views—a fraction of what social media gets. Some of my favorite posts barely got any traction but I am sure someone out there benefited from them (I certainly did). Impact isn’t just about views; it’s also about personal growth. Writing forces me to think deeper, gain insights, and clarify my understanding. If readers enjoy it, that’s a bonus. The reader is what keeps me honest, keeps my quality bar high, so thank you!

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