Want views — write about hot and controversial topics.
Just a short retrospective post.
I started to write this blog about 1.5 years ago. More than 100 stories have been published. Zero dollars earned (this blog was free and will stay free).
And it’s curious to see which stories hit it big while others had very mild success.
Two stories which completely knocked it out of the park:
- ChatGPT. We are all royally f@#$ed. (40k views)
- You can fire 80% of software engineers, and the company will survive. (20k views)
Both stories are about hot topics (ChatGPT and Twitter). Both stories had quite extreme and controversial points of view. Add a pinch of luck to the mix, and boom (you got tens of thousands of views)
Multiple stories did quite well:
- Are you getting too old for software engineering? (8k views)
- A software engineer is always wrong! (3k views)
- Why do the best software engineers always work overtime? (3k views)
- Why are software engineers always unhappy with their managers? (2k views)
- OMG. New management brought their people over. (2k views)
- Is software declining? (2k views)
And interestingly, all of them are pretty much in the same category. They are all related to software (engineering, business). And they touch on some highly emotional subjects. And probably have some level of controversial view (so they are not bland as oatmeal).
And the next category is articles that I thought would have the most views. They contain tons of valuable information and lessons for which I paid by tears and sweat. I call them $1M dollar lessons (pretty much accumulations lessons for success and failures over several decades of my career).
- Building high-quality software (2k views)
- Core engineering principles (1k views)
- Estimates always fail (#NoEstimates) (0.5k views)
- How to build version 1.0? (0.2k vies)
Some of them did ok, but a lot of them ended up with meager views.
And finally, there is one more category. Once in a while, I touch upon some philosophical subject. Man… people in my network hate philosophy :) I am lucky if they get to 100 views.
Here are a couple of examples:
Time to go and meditate on that.
