What I Learned Growing an Engineering Blog from 0 to 463,000 Pageviews - Sahan SerasingheSkip to content<br>I published the first posts on this blog in December 2019.

There was no launch campaign, existing audience, or reliable stream of visitors waiting for them. Like most new personal sites, the blog started at zero. I wrote about problems I had encountered, shared the posts where I could, and hoped somebody searching for the same answers would eventually find them.

By 1 August 2026, the blog had accumulated 463,362 recorded pageviews .

Along the way, it has reached readers in at least 184 countries and territories . Here’s the last month’s stats:

Earlier geography data is not included, so the lifetime reach may be broader.

That number is personally meaningful, but it is not the most interesting part of the story. The useful part is what happened underneath it: a small collection of practical engineering articles generated most of the traffic, some posts kept helping people for years, and many things I assumed would matter barely moved the numbers at all.

This is what I learned.

From zero to 463,362 pageviews

I calculated the lifetime total using two consecutive analytics exports with no overlapping dates.

A few posts did most of the work

The distribution of traffic surprised me more than the total. Just five articles account for roughly 46% of all the pageviews the blog has recorded since launch.

The leading articles are remarkably consistent in what they offer:

ArticleLifetime pageviewsSimple In-Memory Caching in .NET with IMemoryCache86,975Understanding WebSockets with ASP.NET43,272Distributed Caching in ASP.NET Core with Redis31,911Having Fun with Microsoft IoC Container for .NET Core27,812Understanding the .NET Generic Host Model23,040<br>Other durable performers cover securing the Hangfire dashboard, Kubernetes commands and arguments, and gRPC across Go and .NET.

These are not broad opinion pieces. Each one helps a developer understand a specific concept or complete a specific task.

The lesson is not simply that these technologies are popular. It is that clear intent compounds . A post answering a concrete question can remain useful every day for years, even when I am not actively promoting it.

The pattern

Useful, specific posts can compound for years.

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Get new posts →Evergreen technical writing compounds slowly

My highest-traffic article is an introduction to in-memory caching that I published in January 2020. Years later, it is still the largest entry point to the site.

That changed how I think about the return on writing.

A social post has a short distribution window. It may reach many people immediately and then disappear. A useful technical article behaves differently. It may receive very little attention on its first day, but it can be discovered repeatedly through search, links, code repositories, and recommendations.

The early results can feel underwhelming because the compounding is almost invisible. The article needs to be indexed. It needs to answer the query well enough for people to stay. Other pages need to link to it. Search engines need time to understand whether it is useful.

None of my successful posts felt like a breakthrough when I pressed publish. Their value accumulated quietly.

The blog kept working while life took priority

The growth was not driven by a perfectly consistent publishing schedule.

In 2023, I became a first-time dad. My family also moved into a new home, and I changed jobs. I wrote about that season in my plans for sahansera.dev in 2024, acknowledging that blogging had taken a back seat while I focused on being the best dad I could be.

The publication dates tell the story plainly. I published two posts in 2023, none in 2024, and returned with seven posts in 2025. I had hoped to resume a regular schedule sooner, but life had a different rhythm.

I am glad I did not treat the pause as a reason to abandon the blog. While I was not publishing, the existing articles continued answering questions, appearing in search results, and bringing new readers to the site. The work I had already done kept compounding when I did not have the time or energy to add more.

That makes the lifetime total more meaningful to me. It did not come from operating a content machine or forcing myself to publish through every season of life. It came from building a useful body of work, letting it breathe, and returning when I had something worthwhile to share.

The pause

The blog kept growing even when publishing had to wait.

When I started writing again in 2025, I explored streaming APIs, HTTP internals, Python environments, and home-lab Kubernetes. The break had not erased the audience. It gave me a chance to return with different experiences and better questions.

Practical specificity beats broad ambition

The best-performing titles make a small...