2025 was an excellent year for this blog

In 2025, I published 141 posts, 33 of which made it to the front page of Hacker News or similar aggregators. I definitely wrote more in the first half of the year (an average of around 15 posts per month, down to around 8 in the second half), but overall I’m happy with my consistency. Here are some posts I’m really proud of:

• Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases
• The good times in tech are over
• Everything I know about good system design
• Pure and impure software engineering
• Seeing like a software company

As it turns out, I was the third most popular blogger on Hacker News this year, behind the excellent Simon Willison and Jeff Geerling. I don’t put a lot of effort into appealing to Hacker News specifically, but I do think my natural style meshes well with the Hacker News commentariat (even if they’re often quite critical).

I got hundreds of emails from readers this year (I went through Gmail and made it to 200 in the last three months of the year before I stopped counting). Getting email about my posts is one of the main reasons I write, so it was great to read people’s anecdotes and hear what they agreed or disagreed with. I also want to thank the people who wrote blog-length responses to what I wrote (most recently Alex Wennerberg’s Software Engineers Are Not Politicians and Lalit Maganti’s Why I Ignore The Spotlight as a Staff Engineer).

I don’t have proper traffic statistics for the year - more on that later - but I remember I peaked in August with around 1.3 million monthly views. In December I had 700 thousand: less, but still not so shabby. I finally set up email subscription in May, via Buttondown, and now have just over 2,500 email subscribers to the blog. I have no way of knowing how many people are subscribed via RSS¹.

The biggest housekeeping change for my blog this year is that everything now costs a lot more money. I had to upgrade my Netlify plan and my Buttondown plan multiple times as my monthly traffic increased. I pay $9 a month for Netlify analytics, which is pretty bad: it doesn’t store data past 30 days, only tracks the top-ten referrers, and doesn’t let me break down traffic by source. I’m trialing Plausible, since I learned Simon Willison is using it, but once the trial expires it’s going to set me back $60 a month. Of course, I can afford it - on the scale of hobbies, it’s closer to rock climbing than skiing - but there’s still been a bit of sticker shock for something I’m used to thinking of as a free activity.

Thank you all for reading, and extra thanks to those of you who have posted my articles to aggregators, emailed me, messaged on LinkedIn, or left comments. I look forward to writing another ~140 posts in 2026!