It's been just over a year since I started my blog. In fact, this is my 27th blog post. I thought it'd be a good time for me to share some insights on blogging.
Motivation
Recently I've been asked by some people on why I do this. I think for people here there are a lot of reasons for writing blog posts. For example, it may increase your public profile and help you land a job.
Though I believe the blog has helped me in my job hunting process, I don't think it's what motivates me. For me there are two aspects that gives me a big dopamine hit. One is to come up with ideas and concepts that are somewhat unique and interesting. And the second is knowing that people can learn a little from the content I produce.
My personal favourites include:
I love that both of these articles had aspects that weren't well explored in Python before. For the TypedDict one I had an idea to use it for dependency injection. And the pattern matching article explores the structure of iterators in Python and uses it in conjunction with pattern matching.
Honestly the process of experimenting and researching these topics were rewarding on their own. However normally I wouldn't spend this much effort when I don't have an immediate use of it professionally.
Whilst I'm sure there are individuals that write for the sake of writing, I don't I can keep up writing without knowing people are reading it. Knowing that an article is being read by people gives me a lot of satisfaction and keeps me going.
I've tracked the traffic through google search console and cloudflare web analytics.
The numbers are not particularly impressive but I can see it's growing over time. I'm also able to use this information to put more time into topics people are genuinely interested in.
For example, I noticed a few months ago that searches for sub-interpreters were quietly increasing. In all likelihood, this is a combination of its inclusion in Python 3.14, and people generally being unfamiliar with it. This inspired me to research and write a blog post about subinterpreters and asyncio.
Where I share my posts
I started off first sharing my posts on LinkedIn. LinkedIn provided basic metrics already and I probably had the most connections there.
Blusky on the other hand has not been very successful for me, being a relatively new site it has been hard to build up engagement from scratch. However I love using it to follow other people in the Python space.
Finally pycoder's weekly has been simply fantastic. It's a very good source of dedicated Python article and news and my posts fit well with the newsletter. Posts featured there include:
- Python 3.14: 3 smaller features
- Subinterpreters and Asyncio
- TypedDicts Are Better Than You Think
- Free Threaded Python With Asyncio which has a benefit of always being referenced by Simon Willison in his blog post
It's then no surprise that these are also my top performing posts over the past year.
What else should I be doing?
I know some of my posts have been linked on hackernews and have had some engagement there. It sounds a little silly but I've consciously avoided posting myself because I know I'd get hung up over the comments.
That being said, platforms such as reddit and hackernews are just great platforms to have engage in discussions. Since one of my goals is to explore new or obscure features in Python, it is a great place to host these discussions.
Another suggestion I received is to add comments. There are a few good free options available:
- https://utteranc.es/
- https://giscus.app/
They all use github issues or discussion to power the comment section.
Recently I've had some fruitful discussions in github issues from readers, so I'll look to add this in the near future.
Finally
I've personally found the process of writing blogs immensely rewarding, I hope to keep this up for as long as possible. Communication is not everybody's strong suit, and it can be daunting. But I think sharing ideas is really important to keep the ecosystem of Python and engineering fresh and exciting, and I hope more people start writing.