🔗 Developer marketing is show and tell

A single blog post I wrote two years ago remains the most upvoted Buttondown blog post on Hacker News.Just use a monorepo, a 362-word post about a misadventure in splitting Buttondown into multiple git repositories then reverting back into a single repo, was enough to inspire twenty-four thousand words of comments on Hacker News.

Another blog post on my personal blog had a similar trajectory late in 2024. ‌Notes on buttondown.com, the story of buying Buttondown’s shiny new domain, got more likes on social media than almost anything else business-focused that I’d shared this year, and is right now one of the top-five most read things I’ve published on my blog.

Hacker News responded as expected. Congratulations mixed with confusion over the need for such an expenditure. Critiques on how I’d implemented the change or financed the purchase. Confusion over what Buttondown is, in the first place. Some fair, some unfounded.

But 120 upvotes and 89 comments don’t lie. Here’s what I did. Here’s how I did it. Here’s what happened after. It’s a format as old as time—and it’s the thing I’ve seen time and again become the most effective form of developer marketing.