Ask HN: What HN post made you money?

Seven years ago, I started a blog called The Pragmatic Engineer. For three months, I wrote a post every two-three weeks. But no one really read them. So I took a short break, which break turned into a month, then another, another… and I did not have motivation to write. Barely anyone read it, after all.

A few months after starting the blog, I saw a small traffic spike - maybe 30 visitors - from this site called Hacker News after a submission [1]. I never heard about HN before but it looked interesting so I started to visit it, and eventually registered to upvote stories I like.

Then, another few months later - when I had not published anything for 3-4 months - as I was checking out HN, I could not believe what I saw: a months-old post of mine was on the front page titled “Move Fast Without Breaking Things”. Traffic was so high, my site could barely keep up on shared hosting with MediaTemple, my blog running Wordpress.

There were 50+ comments discussing my post, versus the 2 that were on the blog itself (it had a commenting system). The comments were more insightful than I’ve ever seen for any of my blog posts. This was the HN post [2].

Now, this post did not “make me money”. But it WAS a turning point where I got validation that strangers on the internet find what I wrote interesting. And it gave me a motivation to write when no one read it, knowing that just because people are not interested in what I wrote today, people might find it interesting months or years later.

I kept writing my blog for years. Eventually, this blog served as the basis of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter which I launched a year ago, and which is my new fulltime job and one of the most popular technology newsletters with over 120,000 people reading it. More than enough people chose to pay for it to make this a a viable fulltime career on the long run.

Thank you, Hacker News, for those first two submissions, all the comments, and the motivation it gave to keep writing. It was a turning point. I still remember how I could barely believe in March 2016 that so many people I never met can be interested in reading thoughts I put in writing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10692734

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11374221

Who wants to be hired thread got me a nice little raise and the general knowledge/info that I see on HN make a difference in my job. I've got my finger on the pulse of the industry and there are many languages/frameworks/concepts that I first learned about reading HN that I use in my job. Sometimes I spend too much time here but overall HN is a net positive for me and introduces me to things that I wouldn't see elsewhere, even on the tech-related subreddits.

"Is there a HN post that made you money?"

Nope. I assume very few people made any money from an HN post, directly or indirectly.

Edit: Why disagree without reply? Most of us (even on HN) are just normal devs and nothing we do on here will make us money.

Is this the beginning of the end of HN as it becomes a target for free advertisement?

The bootstrapping-type posts got me excited to try my hand at it. I'm at $5k/month (mostly) passive income right now, while also consulting 4 days a week.

Who wants to be hired helped me find my first freelancer gig.