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5 Years of Blogging – Most Popular Articles, Traffic Stats, and other Thoughts.

Photo by Mitchel Boot on Unsplash

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been doing this too long, life gets busy, and I don’t have much to say … but here I am 5 years later. I’m still making people mad and making a fool of myself, some things never change. This will probably be short and sweet. I will cover the top 10 most popular blog posts from those 5 years, what the traffic has looked like over time, and what I’ve learned from writing blogs for so long, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

5 Years of Blogging – Most Popular Articles

I will get straight to the point. Starting in 2018 till now, what are the top 10 most popular Data Engineering blog posts that I’ve written, from most popular on down? I will make a little wager with you, it isn’t going to be what you expect. That’s the number one rule of blogging … little if anything can be predicted, and things are never what you think.

  1. introduction-to-unit-testing-with-pyspark
  2. python-and-apache-parquet-yes-please
  3. top-10-data-engineering-blogs
  4. databricks-vs-aws-emr-theory-and-real-life
  5. airflow-vs-dagster
  6. httpx-vs-requests-in-python-performance-and-other-musings
  7. you-have-to-try-this-from-io-import-stringio-bytesio
  8. converting-csvs-to-parquets-with-python-and-scala
  9. the-3-types-of-data-engineers-which-one-are-you
  10. great-expectations-with-apache-spark-a-tale-of-data-quality

I can tell you, without a doubt, the popular articles are the ones that when writing at the time, I didn’t really care that much about and didn’t put much time into. I mean if I knew they were going to be popular I probably would have written them differently or put more time into them, but according to my track record that would immediately have made them useless and not popular.

Taking away from the top 10 most popular blog posts list.

As the person who wrote the content, and has labored for the unflattering masses these many years, what do I think about that list?

  • People like “how-to” articles generally. How to convert this to that, how to unit test this.

Of course, that makes sense, people are googling what they have an immediate need for, maybe something they are trying to learn. I do it all the time. I guess you and I are the same after all.

  • People like this vs that articles.

I mean I guess things haven’t changed that much since the days of the Roman gladiators. We like a good fight. Data Engineers are no different, we like seeing tools pitted against each other, taking sides, and screaming “fight to the death” until it’s over.

  • It’s impossible to predict the “popular” blogs.

Maybe I’m just an idiot, which I mostly am, but it is truly impossible to predict what’s going to be popular and what isn’t. I can’t what people will start googling, and I can’t decide when some website picks up an article or something gets popular on Reddit. It just happens. I’ve come to the conclusion my best course of action is just to just enjoy the process of writing and sharing Data Engineering topics I find interesting at the moment.

Website traffic stats.

I guess the other way to gain insights is to simply look at the stats and analytics. Where do people come from? What do they click on, blah blah. How long did it take to get a reasonable amount of traffic to the blog after all those years of writing?

I mean it’s clear from that graph that I’ve been writing to myself and my mom most of the time. Those are page views per day still pretty spikey uhh, does make you wonder why it builds over time? Of course, the spikes are probably referrals and popular posts, my guess is just the increasing content pushing the website farther and farther up the google rankings. I guess when they say consistency is key, there is truth in that.

Where do the people come from? Here is a snapshot that tells a story.

Folks come from search engines for the most part, so they just organically find you, no surprise there. The next batch of folks come directly, probably those that are regular readers, which is a large chunk, and which I find strange. Of course social is coming in third, I don’t have a Twitter or Facebook account … I just find it too exhausting to go looking for readers in those spots. Life is hard enough the way it is. Then way down at the bottom is referrals.

I guess if you’re trying to game the system, now you know where to spend your time … which seems somewhat intuitive … build a read base ( I mean that is where a huge part of my readership traffic comes from), and consistently produce content that will find its way into search results. Referrals from social media pale in comparison to these.

Where do my Data Engineering readers hail from? Here is another snapshot.

No surprise that the US and India make up the majority.

Other musings on blogging.

I would say generally blogging isn’t what most people probably think it is. It’s hard and not always easy. What’s hard about it?

  • No one will listen for a long long time.
  • It’s extremely hard to be consistent.
  • It’s hard to come up with novel ideas.
  • The easy topics get boring … but that’s what people like.
  • The complex topics are fun, but no one cares (or very few).
  • It’s hard to find time to write, and do the technical work of research and code.
  • The internet is full of smart people and idiots.

What’s fun about it?

  • You meet people you wouldn’t otherwise.
  • It opens doors and gives opportunities that wouldn’t come otherwise.
  • You get to help others.
  • You learn a lot and are challenged to grow at all times.

Advice for folks who want to do the same thing, blog, build a readership, or something else? Always do because you love what you do, not because you want or need to be popular or smart. Don’t try to be overly complex and impress with your in-depth technical work. There is very little audience for this, generally speaking. Try to walk the line of teaching the basics, incorporating more complex and advanced topics here and there.

There are a lot of people who will drag you down for any number of reasons, the world is out there waiting, and not all of it is good. You just need to ignore it. That’s why isn’t important to start and continue such endeavors because you love the topics and they interest you, not because you’re trying to impress people.

Also, it’s a long game. It’s easy to get burnt out, there a few people who can write good content multiple times a week for years on end. If you’re one of those great, most of us are not. Be realistic and be ok with knowing it’s about being consistent over a few years, not over a month. Life changes, seasons changes, and sometimes you will write more, sometimes less. Sometimes it will be fun, sometimes it won’t.