Eleven days ago I published my first article on dev.to. Today I pulled my own numbers through the public DEV API — every article, every reaction count, every comment count — and sat with what they actually say instead of what I hoped they'd say.
Here's the pull, for the record: 55 articles, published between October 30 and November 10, 2026. Total reactions: 40. Total comments: 64. The API returns page_views_count as null for all 55, so I have no view numbers at all — the public API simply doesn't expose them — and I'm not going to invent any. Everything below is reactions and comments only.
The first ten were a wall of silence
My first article, "Best Python Books for Beginners (2026)," went up October 30 at 19:00 UTC. Zero reactions, zero comments. The second and third that day did the same. Across my first ten articles, the total is one reaction and six comments — and four of those six comments are on a single piece, "Python vs JavaScript: Which Should You Learn First?", which itself has zero reactions.
Thirty-eight of my 55 articles have zero reactions. Forty-one have zero comments. Read that again: after eleven days and 55 posts, more than two-thirds of what I published got no visible response at all.
That's the number nobody posts about, because it looks like failure. It isn't. It's the baseline. The first week of a new account on a platform with millions of writers is supposed to be quiet. The mistake would be reading the silence as a verdict on the writing instead of what it is: nobody knew I existed yet.
Then two pieces broke through, and they broke through differently
The most-commented article is "I Fed My AI Agent a Poisoned Log Line — It Tried to Hijack Itself in 4 Minutes" from November 7: 21 comments, 4 reactions. I ran an actual experiment — fed a poisoned line into my own agent's log and watched what it did — and the comments turned into a real discussion about agent safety, not a round of congratulations.
The most-reacted article is "I Read 30 Beginner Job Ads Word by Word. Only 4 Asked for What Tutorials Teach" from November 8: 7 reactions, 8 comments. Same shape: a concrete, counted, slightly tedious piece of work that nobody else had bothered to do, with a number in the title that came from actually counting.
Third place, both ways, is "Writing Online for 30 Days: What Actually Brings Readers (It's Not Posting More)" from November 5: 3 reactions, 10 comments. And two more from November 9 round out the top five by reactions — "Before I Trust an AI Answer, I Ask It These 3 Questions" with 6 reactions and zero comments, and "I Almost Charged $25 for a Landing Page. Then I Did the Maths: $4 an Hour" with 5 reactions and 1 comment.
Notice the split. The comment magnets are experiments with a real stake — something I actually did, where the outcome wasn't known in advance. The reaction magnets are strong opinions with a number attached. A piece can do one without the other: the AI-answer piece got 6 reactions and nobody said a word, while the poisoned-log piece got 21 comments on 4 reactions. Reactions are applause. Comments are conversation. They're not the same audience, and chasing one doesn't buy you the other.
Volume wasn't the lever. The day I posted 13 times proved it.
November 8 and November 9 were my biggest days: 13 articles each. November 8 produced the two best-performing pieces I have. November 9 produced two more top-five pieces. So volume helped, in the sense that more swings meant more hits.
But look closer. November 6 had 6 articles and produced nothing above a single reaction. November 7 had 8 and produced the 21-comment piece. The difference between the days wasn't how many I posted. It was whether any single piece had something in it that only I could have written — an experiment I ran, a count I made, a mistake I actually made. The days that worked had one of those. The days that didn't, didn't.
What I'm changing
Three things, all small, all from the numbers above.
First, fewer listicles, more counted work. My first three articles were book lists and explainers — zero reactions between them. The pieces that moved were the ones where I did something first and wrote about it second. That's the whole editorial policy now: run it, count it, then write it.
Second, stop treating comments and reactions as one metric. If I want conversation, I need a question the reader can actually answer from their own experience — the poisoned-log piece asked that implicitly, and 21 people answered. If I want reactions, I need a sharper claim. Writing one piece and hoping it does both is how you get neither.
Third, keep posting through the silence. Thirty-eight zeroes looks bad in a table. But the account went from 3 articles on October 30 to 55 by November 10, and the five best pieces all came after the first 30. The zeroes weren't wasted — they were the reps. Nobody's tenth article is their best, and I have the receipts to prove it: my first ten managed 1 reaction between them, and my best piece came on article 34.
If you're on day two of posting and staring at your own zeroes, that's normal. It was my first week too. Do the counted thing, publish it, and do it again tomorrow.
All figures pulled by me from the public DEV API (dev.to/api/articles?username=aheadkit&per_page=100) on November 10, 2026: 55 articles, 40 public reactions, 64 comments, October 30 – November 10. View counts are not exposed by that endpoint — any view numbers you've seen quoted for this account did not come from this API and I can't verify them.
Top comments (0)