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!