👋 I’m Ryan Peterman, Staff Engineer at Instagram. Welcome to my newsletter and blog. I write about software engineering and how to grow faster on the job for 42,000+ software engineers.
After a year of writing, here’s the best way to find relevant articles organized by what the content will help you with (🎖️ = top 10 article):
1. I want to improve my soft skills
2. I want to grow into a mid-level engineer
3. I want to grow into a senior engineer
4. I want to grow into a staff engineer
5. I want to grow to staff+ engineering levels
6. I want help with finding a job/interviewing
7. I want to learn from other engineer’s experience
8. I want to hone my engineering skills
I started this newsletter in 2023 with two goals:
Become better at writing
Help as many software engineers as possible grow their careers
It’s difficult to measure content quality, but looking back at old articles (ex1, ex2) it’s clear to me that new articles are clearer and easier to digest. Practicing writing weekly helped me become a better writer.
I never thought the newsletter would grow as much as it did. I remember telling friends my goal was 100 subscribers by the end of the year. I didn’t have any social media following and thought asking for emails was high friction. If you told me we’d have 42,000+ readers by now I wouldn’t have believed you. Below are highlighted stats from the last year of writing in public.
Inside the Stats
After writing for 9 months, here are the highlights:
43 posts (once a week, haven’t missed yet 🤞)
946,549 total views (~22k/post)
Most shared/engaged post = 106 shares + 18% engagement rate here
It’s also interesting to see where people are reading from. Writing online lets you reach people from all over the world. I was shocked to see that we have readers from all 50 US states and 174 different countries 🙏
Thanks so much for a great year; it’s been a pleasure spending my time writing this content. I hope it’s been helpful for you.
To help me pick future topics that will help the most people, please pick an option from the below poll:
If you found this useful, please share it with a friend and consider subscribing if you haven’t already. Also, if you have feedback about how I can make the content better, please share it here 🙏
Thanks for reading,
Ryan Peterman
Congrats Ryan! You're the best example how quality work is easily recognized by others. Well-done!
Congrats Ryan. What a journey and awesome growth.