What I Learned Today

I published my first article on Medium over the weekend (https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/a27e01e84fac). It got it's first bump from HN, but 17k+ reads following was from Medium's readership. It also got featured on LifeHacker. I don't think they would have found it on my own blog.

Honestly, I didn't see any compelling reasons in that article not to use Medium. My post got it's initial bump from Hacker News, but then everything following has been due to Medium already having a built in readership. If I posted this to my own blog, sure HN would have driven the same amount of traffic. But I don't have a readership like Medium. There's something to be said about Medium's writing tools as well. I found myself enjoying writing again using their system. It's very clean and focused. Maybe I wouldn't have produced as good of an article without it.

Slightly unrelated: this post seemed eerily familiar, so I googled the first sentence and realized why: it was posted on Medium, too. (https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/f7fcb3b786b1)

This is, I think, the chief issue with services like Posthaven, Medium, and Svbtle: by buying into the centralized platform, it means that you're putting your valuable content on some other service instead of using it to further your personal/corporate brand. The simple solution is to repost it, but that leads to the same issues GameFAQs faced with popular titles released on multiple platforms: when the network is split, the network effect weakens and the discourse suffers.

Great article overall, but it seems to be a bit dismissive of music for productivity. It appears[1] the answer is a bit more nuanced: music is great for getting "in the zone" where you are mostly using existing knowledge to create something new. However, when you are really focusing on learning something new and difficult, silence is best.

Anecdotally this seems to match up with my experiences coding. Sometimes I'm more or less just churning out code, and music is great. If theres an ops crisis, or I'm trying out something new, music can hurt rather than help.

Edit, forgot the article:
[1] https://medium.com/what-i-learned-today/be3172896a0f