0 to 7K Subs in 4 months: Wrapping Up 2023

Feels surreal to go from no online presence to building a healthy audience.

I am humbled by the support of my subscribers. I couldn't imagine getting even 1K when I started. Today, I want to take a moment to reflect on my journey and share some of the highlights that have made this experience so rewarding.

Why I started writing?

I am passionate about mentoring other engineers. I find joy in helping people identify the right behavioral changes that can help them level up. I have been doing this for a long time now at work.

So when I started my paternity leave (September - November), I planned to do some pro bono mentoring outside. I created a profile online, but I got no reach outs

I realized I needed to have an online presence and some credibility before someone would pick me as their “mentor”. So I started writing about topics that I had helped people with the most.

What I learned?

Finding your audience and making your content relatable to them is hard. When I started, I had no credibility, my writing was complex, and it wasn't adding value to my readers.

What worked for me was that I started sharing my struggles, learning, and wins. That resonated with many. You saw me as a person who faced relatable challenges and got through them.

That built credibility.

Stats

• Getting 7K subscribers in less than 4 months still feels dreamy. Thank you!

• 24 published articles (including 3 guest posts)

• ~50k views (excluding the guest posts)

• ~25 mentoring sessions

Top Posts

Mastering Leadership Series

• 5 Behaviors that Made Me Approachable

• How to Defend Without Getting Defensive

• Don't Alienate Your New Team as a Manager

• Power Of "I Don't Know"

• 7 Challenges with Long-Term Projects and How to Manage Them

Personal Stories

• From Microsoft Intern to Staff Engineer on

  Ryan Peterman
  ‘s newsletter

• How I got the highest rating

• How I Convinced We Weren't Wrong

• Stay Senior or be Staff?

• What is a Staff Engineer? with

  Nicola Ballotta

Other Top Articles

• Stop Parroting YouTube solutions in System Design Interviews

• How to Write Good Runbooks

• 5 Steps to Debug Anything

• Ownership Podcast: Unlocking 10x Growth with

  Tiger Abrodi

• 7 types of difficult coworkers and how to deal with them with

  Jordan Cutler

Top Mentoring topics

I loved these sessions. Discussing real situations and brainstorming solutions not only expanded my worldview but also felt like a good way to give back.

• Feeling stuck at the senior level (and want to get to Staff).

  • Going beyond senior is a lot about behaviors. You start thinking about what your team can do vs just yourself.

  • I observed a common pattern where folks were hesitant in asking for a promotion, didn't have clarity on expectations, didn't know how to ask for help, or felt under-confident.

  • Sometimes they just needed to hear the same feedback from a third person (e.g., me in this case).

• If the distributed systems field has any future given the rise in GenAI.

  • Some folks were worried if they should switch out of distributed systems now or stick around. Personally, I am sticking around as there will be other infrastructure challenges to support large language models and conversations.

  • I think everyone should understand the basics of GenAI.

    • If you are an app developer, then learn how your product/domain can benefit from it.

    • If you are an infrastructure engineer, then understand how to reduce the cost of running these.

• College students who wanted to improve their chances of getting a job / internship.

  • Given the market conditions, things are slow. So even good engineers feel that their resumes are falling short.

  • Others had the common dilemma of what real work entails. That reminded me of myself while I was in college.

What’s for 2024?

I am pretty excited to write about more niche topics to build up your leadership skills.

You can expects topics like - demystifying vague feedback, protecting your work life balance, why we hesitate in giving feedback, how to grow others to senior / staff level, and many others.

Some of you have also reached out to me for ongoing mentorship. So, I will come up with a model that can work.

Lastly, if you have a topic that you’d like to request, then simply reply back to this email with your suggestions.

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Special thanks to the other creators that guided me and contributed to my success!

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Happy holidays and wishing you a happy new year!

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