Serokell Blog: Year 3 in Review

A few days ago, our blog hit 1 million total pageviews. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not an impressive number – some blogs get a significant part of that traffic in one month. But even if we managed to help only 5% of our readers, that’s 50k people. And it warms my heart to know that.

Coincidentally, it’s also our blog’s third birthday. Yup. Three years have passed since our first blog post, and this is our 148th one. In fact, half of the lifetime of this company has been spent with a rich, multifaceted blog being one of our top priorities. Happy to report that it has turned out awesome. 🙌

In this celebratory blog post, we’ll look at the past year, top articles, and our plans for the future.

Year 3 in numbers

First off, Serokell Blog’s year three in numbers.

This year, we managed to attract almost three times more views than last year while publishing more or less the same amount of articles.

This is a good sign that:

• We are making content that resonates more with you.
• You keep finding and browsing our older evergreen content.

Out of the content we released, a third of articles were about machine learning, rest more or less about regular software development matters. The most covered programming language was, of course, Haskell, but we also managed to cover plenty of Rust and Elixir.

Which were the most-read articles of the last year?

Let’s look at top posts for each of the three major tags: Haskell, Rust, and Machine Learning. For the stats, I have included only posts published this year, so don’t worry, everything is fresh. If anything attracts your attention, check it out – I’ll wait. 😅

Top 5 Haskell articles published last year (by views)

🥇 Type Families in Haskell: The Definitive Guide by Vladislav Zavialov (4.3k views, 35 likes)

🥈 A Brief Introduction to Template Haskell by Heitor Toledo Lassarote de Paula (3.1k views, 40 likes)

🥉 A Short Overview of Typed Template Haskell by Heitor Toledo Lassarote de Paula (2.8k views, 31 likes)

🏅 How Dependent Haskell Can Improve Industry Projects by Danya Rogozin and Vladislav Zavialov (2.2k views, 19 likes)

🏅 Past and Present of Haskell: Interview with Simon Peyton Jones by Jonn Mostovoy (1.9k views, 26 likes)

In the first place, we have the detailed type family article by Vladislav Zavialov, the lead of our GHC team. In the second and third places, we have Heitor’s Template Haskell articles. And if you are waiting for the next article by him, it should come very soon (and it might include a quasi-quotation or two).

After that, we have an article on Dependent Haskell by members of our GHC team and the highlight post from our interview with the one and only SPJ.

Top 5 Rust articles published last year (by views)

🥇 9 Companies That Use Rust in Production by Gints Dreimanis (29.1k views, 125 likes)

🥈 Rust in Production: 1Password by Gints Dreimanis (24.1k views, 190 likes)

🥉 17 Resources to Help You Learn Rust in 2021 by Gints Dreimanis (23.8k views, 136 likes)

🏅 Open-Source Rust: 24 Awesome Frameworks, Projects, and Libraries by Gints Dreimanis (19.6k views, 123 likes)

🏅 Rust in Production: Qovery by Gints Dreimanis (14k views, 99 likes)

Rust has clearly grown in popularity in the last year, with quite a few important events such as the creation of the Rust Foundation. In a way, it’s the child of the same ideas and beliefs that created Haskell, so I am excited to see where it will end up. And if we can help the adoption process by providing a platform where companies can share their knowledge with regular developers, even better.

Top 5 ML articles published last year (by views)

🥇 Top 10 Ideas for Your ML Project in 2021 by Yulia Gavrilova (26.5k views, 270 likes)

🥈 Machine Learning Testing: A Step to Perfection by Yulia Gavrilova (20.8k views, 58 likes)

🥉 What Is Data Preprocessing in ML? by Yulia Gavrilova and Olga Bolgurtseva (18k views, 55 likes)

🏅 What Is ML Optimization? by Yulia Gavrilova (11,8k views, 43 likes)

🏅 Top 18 Low-Code and No-Code ML Platforms by Yulia Gavrilova (10,9k views, 36 likes)

And of course, I would like to thank our resident AI researcher Yulia Gavrilova for her outstanding work on creating accessible articles on machine learning. This year, she has managed to create 19 (!) sizable articles in collaboration with our ML team. Being a writer myself, I can tell you – it’s not easy.

Sneak peek into year 4

In the next year, we want to make sure that the Haskell beginner path is as easy as possible – it’s accessibility, accessibility, accessibility. 👏 We will try to turn our ITMO course into a series of blog articles, the first ones of which should land on the blog next month. Previous work by Kowainik and Type Classes (among others) has been very inspiring, and we want to add to that.

We will also continue to cover intermediate Haskell topics and other programming languages used at Serokell (a big batch of TypeScript articles coming in! 🚀). And given that Rust, which is close to Haskeller hearts, has been gaining more and more traction, we will try to cover it more as well.

Our marketing team also has exciting projects in the realm of merch – if you would like to support this blog by buying very awesome FP t-shirts, stay tuned.

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