Head of Product at Temporal. Previously lead architect and low-level systems programmer for scale out SaaS offering. Game engine developer, ML engineering expert. DMs open on Twitter.
The best advice I’ve ever heard in this regard was to write for you. Write what you’d want to read. This keeps you enjoying the process and the people that connect with you are like you. This makes it easier to connect with your readers and be authentic.
It's a tough one, a lot of the stuff I want to write doesn't do well here at all (for example the machine learning post that took me weeks and has ~1k views). Completely agree about being authentic.
A similar story I once heard was about an Author, I forget who, had a huge success And was going to write her next book. It was a huge success and was under a lot of personal pressure to do it again. She wrote many drafts and hated them. In frustration she thought about how she wrote that first book. She wrote it for herself and 10 of her closest friends. I forget what book followed, but it was another success.
That's a nice anecdote, but I'm not sure it's the "norm". Most of the time you're really only able to write what you "want" once you have the notoriety. There will always be exceptions, but that's the general rule I've observed.
I was really glad to see a comment from you pop up in this post, thanks for taking the time to give me feedback.
After reading your response I think my response can be shifted to it doesn't matter what you writing about as long it's your voice and you're not writing to appease the masses. So Authenticity.
Can I ask you a couple of questions about this?
What are your criteria for a "successful" post (Views, comments, engagement, something else)?
Why do you write? What is the greater purpose of creating content?
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It's a tough one, a lot of the stuff I want to write doesn't do well here at all (for example the machine learning post that took me weeks and has ~1k views). Completely agree about being authentic.
That's a nice anecdote, but I'm not sure it's the "norm". Most of the time you're really only able to write what you "want" once you have the notoriety. There will always be exceptions, but that's the general rule I've observed.
I was really glad to see a comment from you pop up in this post, thanks for taking the time to give me feedback.
I think that's fair.
After reading your response I think my response can be shifted to it doesn't matter what you writing about as long it's your voice and you're not writing to appease the masses. So Authenticity.
Can I ask you a couple of questions about this?