My First 50 Days of Blogging

Why?

I started this blog at the beginning of last month (February 2019) because

• I wanted to become a better writer.
• I felt like I had some interesting/useful things to say.
• I’d sold both of my main side projects and wanted a new challenge.
• I didn’t like the old victorzhou.com and had been itching to rewrite it for a while.
• I wanted to learn more about and get firsthand experience with SEO.

The Numbers

On February 4, I published my first blog post and started my journey. Since then, I’ve

• Published 6 blog posts.
• Gotten 70k+ pageviews.
• Received 600+ subscribers to my newsletter.

Today is March 25, which is my blog’s 50th day! 🎉

Here’s a graph of my blog’s pageviews since its beginning:

The two spikes are both from my posts reaching the front page of Hacker News: first my Javascript bug post and then my Neural Networks post.

Here are all 6 blog posts ranked by number of pageviews:

Page	Pageviews
/blog/intro-to-neural-networks/	36,453
/blog/a-javascript-bug-i-had-once/	6,675
/blog/properly-size-images/	3,721
/blog/how-i-became-a-programmer/	2,122
/blog/why-you-should-use-webpack/	1,753
/blog/better-profanity-detection-with-scikit-learn/	1,331

Goals for Year One

I’m going to keep blogging! During Year One, I’m aiming to

• Publish 50 blog posts.
• Get a million pageviews.
• Grow my newsletter to 10,000 subscribers.

Are these goals pretty ambitious? Definitely. I’ve got a long way to go and a lot of work to do. But I might as well aim high, right?

Anyways - a huge thank you to my readers from the past two months! See you all on February 4, 2020 for the Year One recap, where I’ll look back at this post and see if I hit my goals. 🎯

If you’re curious on my progress since this post, read my 6 months recap.