2023 is coming to an end, and we want to sign off at The Tech Writers Stack with a huge roundup post celebrating all of our community’s achievements.
If you want to get a shout-out, reply in this thread with a short, 200-ish-word summary of what you have achieved this year.
Some ideas about what you can share:
How many subscribers you’ve won
How many posts you’ve written
Your top-3 articles (by whatever metric you prefer)
Don’t forget to include a link to your substack.
And if you still haven’t, consider subscribing to join our community of technical writers, full of free resources and, most importantly, cool people willing to help you grow.
Polymathic Being had its first full year in 2023 and grew from 250 to 2,500 subscribers providing one essay a week on counterintuitive insights across multiple disciplines. (with some mid-week supplementals) We've had some great collaborations and built on the work of others here in The Tech Writer's Stack!
My proudest accomplishment was publishing my first science fiction novel about advanced AI and what it means to be human titled Paradox! https://amzn.to/486P0I8 It weaves in a lot of the topics we explored this year on AI into the storyline.
Where do I start? I launched my Substack, The Python Coding Stack (www.thepythoncodingstack.com), in April, and I published at least once a week, always reasonably detailed, tutorial-type posts or perspectives on certain programming topics–It's article number 45 coming out next to finish off 2023.
Another highlight has been all the new friends I made in the Python and technical writing community, such as The Tech Writers Stack, of course.
And to finish off the year, I'm launching not one but two new learning platforms (what on Earth was I thinking tackling these projects in parallel?!)
One is for professional adults learning to code in Python or looking to get past that late-beginner stage (thepythoncodingplace.com).
The second one is for teenagers to learn to code in Python. Most of my time for almost a decade has focused on teaching Python to children and teenagers and I have developed an extensive curriculum and portfolio of projects. But all of it has been live teaching, until now. Now I'm making my curriculum available to teenagers all over the world via video courses, which include a forum to enable two-way conversation with the students. (Depending on when this summary goes out, the new platform and website may be live)
My first real year substacking on Interconnects, went from 600 to 7500+ subs, 100paid, 55 posts, a few viral ones, and *one growing community of writers :)*. Excited to meet some of you in person in 2024!
Friends, I love this community, and I'm happy to be a small part of it. While my writing ranges all over the place, the technical aspects (explaining complex things to folks) remains incredibly important to me, and central to much of my work.
I started in late April 2023 with zero subscribers, and I refused to leverage social media platforms as I had done every time in the past when creating something new. I wanted this to be from scratch, and so I set about individually inviting some folks, then I found a few great communities here. The Tech Writers Stack was the first place where I made meaningful connections and felt like I belonged.
Since then, I've managed to amass somewhere between 800 and 900 subscribers, and I've published a piece every day (up to 256 as of today), all of which I consider reasonably good work. I love starting my day with a mental workout!
It was funny to write about this, because I was sure everything had already been said about Göbekli Tepe, but that's just my own personal bias, having done a few semi-deep dives into the history.
A really rewarding post was working with Alex on this one:
I'm so grateful to the community here, and on Substack in general. This place was among the very first to make me feel at home, and I will never forget that feeling.
I started Society's Backend in August as a creative outlet just to get my thoughts down once a week. About 20 articles later, I've got around 300 subscribers which amazes me. My writing is really about whatever I'm thinking about at the time, but it turns out I think a lot about machine learning and software engineering. Society's Backend has become about the engineering complexities behind the AI that powers society. Here is it for anyone interested: https://societysbackend.com/.
It's been awesome to connect with so many of you and it's made writing even more enjoyable. I hope to connect with more of you in the future. Thank you all!
I moved from Hey, World to Substack with a 100 subscribers in May and will be closing in on 1000 early next yer, I'm pretty sure. More than I ever thought I would get when I decided to try a newsletter. I also turned on paid at 500 ... and surprisingly, I have over 10 paid subscribers and some even chose to doing the founding option. That blows mind. I was really hesitant to turn on paid.
My top 3 articles are pretty much about prompt engineering.
I'm a former academic and trainer. Biggest achievement of the year was taking the plunge into blogging. For the first time in a while, I'm enjoying writing for its own sake. It's a refreshing change from the publish-or-perish nature of modern academic writing.
At the end of October, I launched my Substack newsletter: Blog System/5. I created this as an experiment and moved my periodic article writing from my homegrown blog into Substack.
The goal I have is to see how much the Substack platform helps grow an audience because my personal blog (which has been around for 19+ years) was "stuck" and never gained any traction. By the end of 2023, I'll have published 15 posts. I currently have about 160 subscribers, and 1 of them is paid! I think the experiment is working so far.
Discovered substack this year
Great tools and great community
I've imported a lot of articles and also written about 20
https://maxicontieri.substack.com/
Oh man, I didn't know you were here! Welcome :)
Polymathic Being had its first full year in 2023 and grew from 250 to 2,500 subscribers providing one essay a week on counterintuitive insights across multiple disciplines. (with some mid-week supplementals) We've had some great collaborations and built on the work of others here in The Tech Writer's Stack!
My proudest accomplishment was publishing my first science fiction novel about advanced AI and what it means to be human titled Paradox! https://amzn.to/486P0I8 It weaves in a lot of the topics we explored this year on AI into the storyline.
My top three posts are:
1. The Layers of AI - Exploring the Whole System
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/the-layers-of-ai
2. The Enemy's Gate is Down - Counterintuitive insights from the War on Terror:
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/the-enemys-gate-is-down
3. An Ode to Beer - History, Science, and Culture (a collaboration with Andrew Smith)
https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/an-ode-to-beer
That's one hell of an achievement list :)
Hey Michael (fellow AI writer here), looks cool, looking forward to reading something in 2024 (too burnt out to add to my reading list right now)
Looking forward to collaborating in 2024!
Hi Michael, another AI writer here. Great to meet you and congratulations on a wonderful 2023. Look forward to reading your work in the coming year :)
Great to connect. I'm always open to collaborations as well!
I'd love to collaborate. Let's figure something out for Q1?
Yes. Connect with me at polymathicdisciplines@gmail.com
Looking forward to it .
Where do I start? I launched my Substack, The Python Coding Stack (www.thepythoncodingstack.com), in April, and I published at least once a week, always reasonably detailed, tutorial-type posts or perspectives on certain programming topics–It's article number 45 coming out next to finish off 2023.
Another highlight has been all the new friends I made in the Python and technical writing community, such as The Tech Writers Stack, of course.
And to finish off the year, I'm launching not one but two new learning platforms (what on Earth was I thinking tackling these projects in parallel?!)
One is for professional adults learning to code in Python or looking to get past that late-beginner stage (thepythoncodingplace.com).
The second one is for teenagers to learn to code in Python. Most of my time for almost a decade has focused on teaching Python to children and teenagers and I have developed an extensive curriculum and portfolio of projects. But all of it has been live teaching, until now. Now I'm making my curriculum available to teenagers all over the world via video courses, which include a forum to enable two-way conversation with the students. (Depending on when this summary goes out, the new platform and website may be live)
210 words - phew!!
Haha, +10 words I think gets into the valid range for "-ish"
It was wonderful to meet you Stephen! I'm excited to see what you do in 2024 :)
Can I link to this post where I did a retrospective?
https://open.substack.com/pub/artofsaience/p/one-year-into-the-gradient-ascent
TL;DR
- Gradient Ascent from 0 to 6000 subscribers
- I found an incredibly supportive and amazing community of writers
- Through writing, new opportunities like speaking engagements and collaborations happened :)
So grateful for this year 🙏🏼
Nice! Hello fellow AI writer. Learning of so many these days!
Hey Nathan! Great to meet you! It's amazing to see so many other AI writers here :)
My first real year substacking on Interconnects, went from 600 to 7500+ subs, 100paid, 55 posts, a few viral ones, and *one growing community of writers :)*. Excited to meet some of you in person in 2024!
Representative top posts:
State of what it's like to work in AI: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/behind-the-curtain-ai
Llama 2:https://www.interconnects.ai/p/llama-2-from-meta
AI job search recon: https://www.interconnects.ai/p/ai-research-job-market
Awesome! That's one hell of a jump :)
Wow that's an incredible year! Congratulations, Nathan. It's wonderful to meet you and would love to collaborate with you in 2024 :)
Just started! Exploring wide-ranging ideas on how society can get better at technology. Only three posts so far but lots more planned for 2024.
1. Progress Towards What? - Our ideas about progress need to evolve
https://techforlife.substack.com/p/progress-towards-what
2. Calling All Philosophers - Reconnecting theory with practice
https://techforlife.substack.com/p/calling-all-philosophers
3. Our Coordination Paradox - Everyone agrees we must get better at coordination, so why aren't we doing anything about it?
https://techforlife.substack.com/p/our-coordination-paradox
Friends, I love this community, and I'm happy to be a small part of it. While my writing ranges all over the place, the technical aspects (explaining complex things to folks) remains incredibly important to me, and central to much of my work.
I started in late April 2023 with zero subscribers, and I refused to leverage social media platforms as I had done every time in the past when creating something new. I wanted this to be from scratch, and so I set about individually inviting some folks, then I found a few great communities here. The Tech Writers Stack was the first place where I made meaningful connections and felt like I belonged.
Since then, I've managed to amass somewhere between 800 and 900 subscribers, and I've published a piece every day (up to 256 as of today), all of which I consider reasonably good work. I love starting my day with a mental workout!
This was my most viewed/shared post:
https://goatfury.substack.com/p/gobekli-tepe
It was funny to write about this, because I was sure everything had already been said about Göbekli Tepe, but that's just my own personal bias, having done a few semi-deep dives into the history.
A really rewarding post was working with Alex on this one:
https://goatfury.substack.com/p/driving-over-miss-daisy
And, yet another collab, this time with Michael:
https://goatfury.substack.com/p/an-ode-to-coffee
I'm so grateful to the community here, and on Substack in general. This place was among the very first to make me feel at home, and I will never forget that feeling.
I started Society's Backend in August as a creative outlet just to get my thoughts down once a week. About 20 articles later, I've got around 300 subscribers which amazes me. My writing is really about whatever I'm thinking about at the time, but it turns out I think a lot about machine learning and software engineering. Society's Backend has become about the engineering complexities behind the AI that powers society. Here is it for anyone interested: https://societysbackend.com/.
My most read article: https://societysbackend.com/p/machine-learning-infra
My most researched article: https://societysbackend.com/p/text-summarization-algorithms
My favorite article to write: https://societysbackend.com/p/why-everyone-loves-spider-man
It's been awesome to connect with so many of you and it's made writing even more enjoyable. I hope to connect with more of you in the future. Thank you all!
I moved from Hey, World to Substack with a 100 subscribers in May and will be closing in on 1000 early next yer, I'm pretty sure. More than I ever thought I would get when I decided to try a newsletter. I also turned on paid at 500 ... and surprisingly, I have over 10 paid subscribers and some even chose to doing the founding option. That blows mind. I was really hesitant to turn on paid.
My top 3 articles are pretty much about prompt engineering.
https://www.isophist.com/
I'm a former academic and trainer. Biggest achievement of the year was taking the plunge into blogging. For the first time in a while, I'm enjoying writing for its own sake. It's a refreshing change from the publish-or-perish nature of modern academic writing.
https://sphelps.substack.com/
At the end of October, I launched my Substack newsletter: Blog System/5. I created this as an experiment and moved my periodic article writing from my homegrown blog into Substack.
The goal I have is to see how much the Substack platform helps grow an audience because my personal blog (which has been around for 19+ years) was "stuck" and never gained any traction. By the end of 2023, I'll have published 15 posts. I currently have about 160 subscribers, and 1 of them is paid! I think the experiment is working so far.
As for my "top 3 articles", I'd link to:
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-peeking-into-the-cradle
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/bazelcon-2023-et-al-trip-report
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/the-ides-we-had-30-years-ago-and
That's a great start man!
I shared my year review on Substack in a post: https://codeconfessions.substack.com/p/celebrating-4096-subscribers