This is my two-hundredth blog post. 9 years running, though the early dates have been lost to time and bugs (my RSS feed insists that we started publishing in August, don’t ask me why, and I cannot fix it). Many memories, many blog posts I wouldn’t write anymore, but nothing so embarrassing that I wouldn’t leave it here for time immemorial, or at least until I don’t pay my DigitalOcean bills any more.
For this mostly inconsequential milestone, I’ve decided to crunch some numbers and try to chart them in JavaScript, because I do not actually know how to do that, and it sounded like a fun challenge.
The vibe-coded scraping code lives here. It collects way more metrics than I’m presenting here, so if you’re curious, do check it out for yourselves!
First, let’s start with the baseline metrics:
I learned a few things from this: firstly, I’ve written a metric ton of words for this blog. At 167,000 words, I’ve blogged either a SICP or a Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (sans the bigotry or knack for writing). This is without counting the code, by the way.
Secondly, a lot of my blog posts are surprisingly short. I always thought I was rather wordy, but at around 700 words per post, I’m actually somewhere in between tweet and treatise. I’m delighted to know that while I can ramble (at least 20 of my posts are 1,600 words or longer), I don’t do so compulsively.
Thirdly, my two year blogging break (see
Max days between posts) did not hurt my average frequency
too much. Both the mean and median sit comfortably in a weekly or
bi-weekly window, which is about the speed of inspiration for me, I
think.
If we look at the posts by year, we can see a clear trend for clusters. I blogged a whole lot when I first started at the end of 2016 and in 2017, the year in which I attended the Recurse Center. I kept that up through 2018, then life caught up with me for a while before I returned this year.
Now, “life catching up with me” came gradually. I still published more than one post per month in 2019-2021, but I definitely slowed down more than I even realized myself at the time. I’m glad that I am back.
Words per year looks similar.
I wrote the equivalent of around 220 pages in 2017 and 160 pages in 2018, then the series collapsed a bit. This year is special, because word count increased faster than post count: my posts are inching towards 1,000 words per post nowadays on average.
What about lines of code per year?
Similar shape, though I see two trends here: firstly, I wrote a lot more code per post in 2019 than before. This makes sense to me: I wrote a lot of tutorials on macros and Carp.
Initially, me writing more code this year surprised me, but then I realized that the PostgreSQL plugin tutorial as well as the final posts in my series on macros and season I of my Simple Sudoku Solvers series all happened this year. I was busy indeed!
Finally, let’s look at the buckets of long versus short posts.
I’m using buckets of 500 words here. We see a lot of short posts, presumably mostly PSAs, short stories and the like. Then a solid amount of 500-2000 words posts and a long tail of longer posts.
Can you guess what the 4,500+ word blog post might be? Of course it’s my 2017 post on the Carp compiler, clocking in at 4817 words!
Two hundred is just a number, and I plan to surpass it quite soon. I have about 25 posts already planned, and I’m still feeling like the writing spark is back.
It was fun digging into the history of my writing and even dispelling some myths I’ve been telling myself. As this anniversary and the year of 2025 come to an end together, it is fun to instead look forward and think of all the things that are to come: I can see the future quite well, and it includes more posts about writing, about running tech orgs, and of course a smattering of posts about technical minutiae most do not care about. For the few who do: I’ll see you around!