I wrote a dev tool post that got 25k reads. My follow-up got 11. Here's what I learned.

Back in 2018 I wrote a Medium article about a school project I built to help clean up GitHub repositories. I had published the little app and shared it with classmates. Little did I know that people were using the tool! The way I found out was this: I published some other crappy article on Medium and wanted to see how many people had read it. It was something like 6. But I couldn't help but notice there were over 10k reads on the dev tool one. And a bunch of comments about how it's broken and it sucks. Woo hoo. So I immediately fixed all the bugs and responded to the comments. After that I polished up the app, made a new UI, and generally got obsessed with the the project again. Funnily enough, even after that wake up call I didn't think about starting a db to track usage. I eventually did in 2022, but I lost 4 years of it's most popular time period. The db went down in 2024 and I didn't notice for like 9 months. Jeez. There were a lot of hard lessons learned here. Eventually I got all