What it felt like to hit the Hacker News front page

What the fuck, I mumbled to myself. I sat outside a burger place, Friday 6 PM. I had just ordered and wanted to check my blog stats. Normally, I do this every other day, but once a day after posting something new.¹ I had no big expectations for the post I had published two days earlier, about turning my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper. I actually worried a bit that I wouldn’t match my previous post’s success. That one got my blog picked up by Kagi, which brought in around 150 to 200 page views per day.²

But when I opened up my stats, I saw 11,000+ page views within the last hour. I froze and initially thought something bad had happened. Maybe someone spammed my site. But then I noticed that a lot of it came through Hacker News. I checked my account, but it showed no comments or points. Confused, I pulled up the front page and immediately spotted the title of my blog post. It ranked 8th.

I felt happy and anxious at the same time. My burger now sat in front of me, but I had no appetite. I took screenshots and sent them to my family. I tried to eat as much as I could, but I couldn’t sit still anymore. I called friends and walked through the city, sharing my excitement.

It took me some time to realize what had happened. A Hacker News user called speckx submitted my blog post and it somehow gained traction. At the time of writing, their post has 226 points and 102 comments. I read all the comments as they came in and wondered whether I should chime in too. But I didn’t. I felt like I was holding a beautiful, precious vase. I feared that anything I did could break it, so I just stood there and watched. Only at around midnight did I receive an email saying that I had reached 50% of my monthly credit allowance, so I upgraded my Netlify plan.³

After one week the post received more than 120,000 requests across all user-agent categories. According to Netlify’s web analytics, 48,230 unique visitors found my blog. These numbers feel absolutely insane to me. I also noticed someone shared the post on Reddit and probably in some Telegram group.⁴ The feedpaper project now sits at 70 stars and 3 forks on GitHub. Numbers aside, the best part of all was seeing people comment, share, and get inspired by something I created.

I feel incredibly grateful to speckx for setting all this off. A few weeks ago I lay in bed late at night, frustrated, staring at the ceiling. I still had nothing, but I had to release something. Maybe, I thought, I just sucked at this. Maybe I should invest my time in something else. I consider myself more lucky than skilled, but if I hadn’t pushed through that night, I wouldn’t have experienced this moment.

Back before I had published a single post, I wrote on my about page: “we will see together where this blog ends up.” A lot more of you are here now. Welcome.