I originally started putting ads on my blog after people started being an asshole about my articles on Hacker News, originally scoped to only readers from Hacker News. That combined with Patreon pays for all my hosting costs (even the CDN on fly.io and my random AWS infrastructure) and all the video games I play (about $280 US per month of income). It's gotten to the point where it's a tax burden, but I think it's worth it. I've never had a side project make an actual profit before and I'm excited to keep writing as a way to hone my skills and get experience with even more fun technology.
My recent post on embedding Rust into Go programs with WebAssembly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713717) made me about $20 of ad impressions on the day of its release, pretty impressive given how many of you people must run ad blockers!
It'd be cool to make my blog generate more income and eventually take over as my full time job, but I'm pretty happy with the fact that it's a side project that I can peck at when I want to. A lot of energy that would be spent doing various random Discord/IRC bots that go nowhere ends up being thrust into the blog instead. I also love being able to integrate various cursed things (like a Dhall script that takes my salary history data to spit out LaTeX for my resume: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/dhall/latex/resume.dhal...) and then write up how I did it and why. It makes coming up with ideas for the blog a lot easier!
I have plans to make a "Why I think WASI is cool" style post with interactive terminals that run WebAssembly programs in the browser, but I'm still trying to figure out how to graft xterm.js into my custom build setup with Deno. I have an untested but should theoretically work implementation here though in case anyone has any tips: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/src/frontend/wasiterm.t...
My recent post on embedding Rust into Go programs with WebAssembly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33713717) made me about $20 of ad impressions on the day of its release, pretty impressive given how many of you people must run ad blockers!
It'd be cool to make my blog generate more income and eventually take over as my full time job, but I'm pretty happy with the fact that it's a side project that I can peck at when I want to. A lot of energy that would be spent doing various random Discord/IRC bots that go nowhere ends up being thrust into the blog instead. I also love being able to integrate various cursed things (like a Dhall script that takes my salary history data to spit out LaTeX for my resume: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/dhall/latex/resume.dhal...) and then write up how I did it and why. It makes coming up with ideas for the blog a lot easier!
I have plans to make a "Why I think WASI is cool" style post with interactive terminals that run WebAssembly programs in the browser, but I'm still trying to figure out how to graft xterm.js into my custom build setup with Deno. I have an untested but should theoretically work implementation here though in case anyone has any tips: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/src/frontend/wasiterm.t...
Filing my taxes is a huge pain now lol.