I have not had a huge success with my writing in this blog so far. I don’t collect any analytics1, so I am not sure exactly how each post fares, but based on the amount of comments I have received in the various platforms I have shared my posts, the traffic must not be very high.

This has not discouraged me from writing. My goal is to share projects that I am developing and to express some of my thoughts when I feel like it. I am glad if someone finds the content interesting and I am even happier to engage anyone who sends a comment my way. In any case, I think that the mere act of sitting down and writing your thoughts is beneficial by itself and it is worth doing, even if the audience is not there.

It is true, though, that it feels nice when people accept what you are offering. And two days ago, I finally got my first breakthrough. I shared my last post on Hacker News and it reached the front page.

I admit it was satisfying to see that a lot of people approved of the message and wanted to share their own opinions. I spent the next day or so participating in the discussion and digesting all the new information that was available. One of the main themes of the discussion was user interface accessibility. It is a part of software development that is of great interest and importance and I hope to more systematically approach it in my programming and my writing in the near future.

The whole experience was positive. I do not claim to be a great writer, nor that my post proclaimed some profound truth, but it was gratifying to see that an extended discussion was started because of something I wrote. As a result, I now am a little braver to share my thoughts with the world.

  1. I think they can create bad incentives for content creation. ↩