Serokell Blog: Year 2 in Review

Since we last checked in a year ago, our blog has grown remarkably. In addition to articles on Haskell, we now have daily visitors that are interested in machine learning and other programming languages like Elixir, Rust, and TypeScript.

Now, on the day of our blog’s second birthday party, it’s time to look at the past year again.

In this post, we’ll examine some of our data to discover the best-received topics and articles, as well as to suggest some gems that you might have glossed over. Let’s dive straight in.

Serokell Blog Year 2: Electric Boogaloo

Over the last year, we have published 53 articles by 15 authors, the list of which includes engineers, ML enthusiasts, and almost all of our executives. Because of our prolific publishing, the viewer count has exploded, increasing by almost 300% in comparison to the last year. We’ve also upgraded our design to make sure that our blog can serve the interests of all of our diverse audiences.

Let’s see which of the topics have been the most covered.

Looks like we’re still a Haskell company. 😊 In addition, this year Yulia Gavrilova started covering machine learning and artificial intelligence with her impressive articles. We have also begun interviewing executives from companies that use functional programming, so if you are interested in seeing how languages like Haskell and Elixir are used in production, be sure to check those out.

But out of all of our articles, which were the ones you viewed and liked the most?

The leading articles are on TypeScript and Rust, mostly because those serve a broader audience. But we don’t plan on dropping functional programming just because of that!

A fun fact is that two of the top 10 articles are actually ones published last year. One of our goals is to create content that is so useful that people revisit it for at least the next couple of years. Therefore, it’s awesome to see that people keep returning and reading our articles a year after they are posted.

Did something catch your attention? Here’s the whole top 10 with links:

1. Why You Should Choose TypeScript Over JavaScript
2. Introduction to Rust
3. How to Learn Haskell in 10 Minutes a Day
4. A Guide to Deep Learning and Neural Networks
5. Developing GHC for a Living: Interview with Vladislav Zavialov
6. 10 Reasons to Use Haskell
7. A Brief Guide to OTP in Elixir
8. Why Dependent Haskell is the Future of Software Development
9. Software Written in Haskell: Stories of Success
10. Haskell in Production: Riskbook

We also have a feature where readers can express their approval for the article with a like button. Here are the most liked articles of this year:

One of the articles that we didn’t see in the Top 10 list is Danya Rogozin’s introduction to modal logic. If the topic interests you, I suggest checking it out. The article series features glorious hand-drawn images, including multiple snakes on a plane (but no Samuel L. Jackson, unfortunately).

Serokell on social media

One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that our auditories on different social networks are quite different. While our Twitter auditory is deep into Haskell, Facebook is more into exploring a wide variety of languages, and LinkedIn … LinkedIn is into actual business, as you might have guessed. 😅

Here are the most popular blog articles on each of our main social media.

We have also created a Medium account where we feature our best blog posts that are not focused on programming. If you’re interested in following us there, here’s the link.

Future of the blog

In the next year, you can expect multiple cool things. First of all, we’ll soon launch a new series that will document our work on GHC: Towards Better Haskell. In it, Vladislav Zavialov and his team will delve deep into the internals of GHC and the features we implement to improve it.

In addition, we plan to continue covering languages like Haskell, Elixir, and Rust in the next year and how they can be used to build excellent products. In particular, we have a lot of beginner-oriented Elixir and Rust tutorials coming up, as well as deeper dives into the work we do with Haskell on Tezos.

We also would like to show you more of how software is built at Serokell, starting from design and technical requirements to language choices and development. Our writers are still brainstorming the exact details of that, though.🌩️

To everybody that is constantly reading the blog, thank you for being with us! We hope we can do even better next year. If you would like to suggest a topic you want to read about in the next year, you can write to us on social media like Twitter or use the box below. 😉 We’ll be sure to check all of the messages.