Large numbers
Tags: thanks, meta
Published: 2018-11-21 13:10:34

---
title: Large numbers
published: true
description: Some personal musings about my post views
tags: thanks, meta
cover_image: https://ethendras.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/numbers1.jpg 
---

Sometime last night I clicked over 10k views across the articles I've posted here.  Thanks, post analytics!  While an arbitrary milestone, it was still pretty jarring to see, and on my drive into work I started trying to unpack why that is.  I'm not sure what I expected - I'm writing specifically so that other people would see it.  I never excepted to garner that much attention so quickly, though - Dev.to has completely caught me by surprise.

For one, thanks.  It's been validating as heck - one tricky thing about self-learning on your own is coming to any sort of understanding about how much you know or don't know.  I've been operating under the assumption that I know nothing - and I think that's still more or less true, but it's nice to know I've got something to show for the work I've put in thus far.

Second, I guess I've got to start taking this more seriously.  What if I *am* dead wrong about something?  If it's gone uncorrected, I likely don't realize the error myself and I'd hate to lead anyone down a wrong path.

Until I became active on this website nobody except a few bored GitHub explorers had ever seen any code I'd written or heard any thoughts I'd had about the matter.  My poor girlfriend has been subjected to a couple of rants here and there (okay, more than a couple - she could probably write her own Clojure at this point if coerced) but beyond that it's been a quiet, solitary hobby.

The simple act of publishing this writing *here* as opposed to anywhere else means that all of a sudden I'm accountable for it.  It will get seen.  That's super weird.  When writing was done for primarily my own benefit it was a very different game.  I wrote to gain a deeper understanding of tools I was using - I figured if I could explain something in English, I pretty much understood it.  In certain cases this has uncovered gaps in my understanding of concepts I thought I had a good grasp on, so the act of writing has been reward enough. It's a pretty big mental shift to write for a platform with an audience built-in.

Every time I post something, I do so with the assumption that this community knows *more* about the subject matter than I do.  I expect to be corrected when wrong, it's part of my learning process.  And I have been, occasionally, which has been really cool.  But mostly I've just thrown this stuff out there and *thousands* of you have just accepted it at face value, sometimes within just a day or two, as opposed to the *dozens* I was expecting to come through and tear everything apart.  Part of the quick uptick in attention is that I have specifically opted to write about things for which I found little to no material on when I was learning it the first time.  Like many of us, I wrote posts I wish I'd had to read and learn from myself.  This means, though, that I don't have a huge body of examples to compare to - the responsibility of authority is now mine, and I'm still grappling with how to handle that responsibility...responsibly, while still feeling I have no such actual authority to back it up.

I don't have much in the way of a thrilling conclusion, but seeing that fifth digit definitely gave me cause to step back and think a little about what it means. My takeaway will be that the "Write a Post" button is not at all unlike getting up on a soapbox in front of 10,000 incredibly smart people, perhaps in a way that's more direct than other social blogging platforms - an interesting and intimidating opportunity, and potentially a fantastic way to learn.

I can't wait to see what else you lot have to teach me.