2024 Wrapped: My Blogging Journey

A reflection of me as a writer and software engineer this year. And some exciting plan for 2025 🥳

It’s the end of 2024! I would like to briefly cover my blogging journey and my achievements.

2024 in Numbers

I moved to Substack in November so having all these numbers are very fresh to me :) I didn’t have any of these in previous hosting platforms.

My Most Popular Posts

I wrote 18 articles in total.

🥇 7 Signs You're Underperforming as an Engineer

🥈 The Mistakes That Made Me a Low-Performing Leader (and How You Can Avoid Them)

🥉 Problem-Solving Like a Senior Dev

What I Learned this Year

Never Shut Down My Blog Again

One big mistake that I made was to shut down my blog.

In late 2023, I’m not sure why but I decided that I don’t want to do blogging anymore. I shut down my blog server entirely. It was too late when I turned it back on two months later.

The following is my organic traffic graph from Ahrefs:

You can see the before/after comparison.

• Before: 25 visits per day

• After: 2-3 visits per day

It never came back. Traffic means audience, and it’s sad to see that I am not able to reach the same audience I had before.

💡 If I were to start a blog today, I would never shut it down, as you never know when you might want to restart.

Motivations Need More Than “Fun”

Fun is good, but it will fade away if it is not supported by other motivations.

I wrote more than 100 articles for the first few years. All articles were posted to the void. No one cared. I wrote those articles just for my personal learning.

Some of the posts that I wrote back in the days:

• Implementing rubocop to an existing (might be messy) project

• Web crawling in Ruby with Capybara

I did not tailor them for others to read, so there were few readers.

The passion faded when I became busy, and then I barely wrote anything.

💡 This year, I realize that motivations also need connection with readers. Knowing that people read my work give me stronger motivation to move forward.

Blogging is Writing. Not Building.

Like many software engineers, I wanted my blog to be one of a kind.

Before I moved to Substack, I hosted my blog on my Ruby on Rails app for a long time. I built it, deployed it, and I felt satisfied.

However, maintaining it took a lot of time: updates, patches, and new functions. I ended up spending a lot of time “building” the blog instead of writing. Those time were wasted before I finally moved to a blogging platform.

💡 After I moved to Substack, everything became easier. I could finally focus on writing (and dropped my software engineer ego).

Moving forward in 2025: The Plan

I’m grateful to start having consistent readers. Substack is an amazing platform. I have never experienced growth like this.

I’m setting up my 2025 goals here. I will review them at the end of the year.

Writing

• Stick to weekly writing and finish 52 articles in 2025.

• Do 10 cross-posting with other Substack authors (Feel free to reach out to me with DM if you’re interested).

Growth

• Grow to 10k subscribers (currently 2.4k, including 120 from Substack) 🤞

Paid Content

• Start writing paid content (While I have a paid plan available, I haven't published any paid content yet 😅).

• Have at least 10 paid subscribers.

• Publish my first e-book on software engineering career growth.

• Start offering services such as coaching, resume review, mock interview, etc.

Last Words

I really appreciate all readers and writers who connect with this blog/newsletter. It’s been a good year and I will strive for more in 2025 🚀🚀🚀

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