After the HN Spotlight: A Quick Introspection

TLDR: One of my open-sourced projects got popular; backstory, lessons for the future and traffic metrics.

Backstory

Since I started this blog in Jan 2025, my goal was to not sit on things I want to be published for too long. After posting about two small projects in Jan, I got caught up in longer term projects and didn’t publish anything in Feb and almost all of March. I added a high priority task to the last week of March to publish something before the month ends.

Looking at my notes and things I hacked together in the last two months, the dashboard I built for monitoring the power draw of my work in progress workstation using a smart plug ranked higher in terms of readiness.

WattWise started as a terminal dashboard and I experimented with using the data to automate core level frequency thresholding to reduce idle power draw. The dashboard was ready after some code cleanup, but the ‘power optimizer’ parts weren’t quite ready for others to try without more testing. So I pushed just the WattWise dashboard code to my Github repo.

Posting on HN

Hacker News has been an integral part of my daily reads for the last 13+ years - one of the few sites I check multiple times a day. I’ve discovered countless products and interesting posts there, and often the comments contain the most valuable insights. So I wanted to share my blog on HN after publishing.

On the morning of April 1st, while still in bed, I logged into news.ycombinator.com and started a ‘Show HN’ post. After editing the title and description in the Notes app on my phone, I clicked submit and went on with my morning routine.

When I got to my desk, I opened HN in incognito and checked the ‘new’ tab to see how the post was doing. Surprisingly, I couldn’t find it even after clicking ‘more’ - but to my absolute shock, it had somehow gotten 10+ upvotes and reached the top 5 of Hacker News! I quickly took a screenshot thinking it might disappear from the front page and sent it to my friend Alex in disbelief.

Lesson 1: Don’t write HN post titles from your phone and while in bed next time.

When I logged into my account 30+ mins later and started answering some of the incoming comments, Right away I realized my title and description emphasized the ‘power optimizer’ part of the project more than I would’ve wanted since I didn’t open source it. My post inadvertently ended up being click-baity for some HN readers.

Lesson 2: Most readers skim through the post. Structure your content for fast reading.

Not mentioning what kind of CPU I’m using at the very top meant a lot of people reached the conclusion that I’m trying to optimize Ryzen or other consumer class CPUs instead of finding out that I’m using two server class EPYC CPUs in my workstation.

When I looked at the analytics, I quickly realized most people just glance through the pages they’re visiting. I had to quickly edit the post to prominently feature my workstation specs on top.

Lesson 3: Explain the implementation or tell the story?

WattWise is the 3rd project I’ve posted, with two previously open-sourced under MIT license. My approach has been: share why I built something, offer the code, with minimal long-term support expected. I’m still not sure why WattWise resonated more than others. Was it the click-baity title? The backstory? People’s love for CLI tools? I have so far emphasized on the story part more since LLMs can now explain any codebase pretty well, but only I can tell how it came to be.

Lesson 4: Don’t post on HN just before a planned week-long trip

I rushed to publish before a planned week-long trip, which is why I open-sourced the code and immediately archived it to avoid dealing with issues while away. As it turns out, projects that reach HN’s front page often get picked up by other tech websites.

While checking analytics, I noticed visitors from “Tomshardware.com”. Investigating further, I found WattWise featured on their homepage! A reader commented about the archived repository status and even accused the article of being AI-generated (it wasn’t). I then had to create an account just to comment that I’d unarchive the repo and continue support - problematic when I won’t have laptop access for a week. I promised to clean and push the power optimizer code (still pending) and there are already two issues I haven’t fixed yet.

Lesson learned: don’t post projects requiring maintenance when you’ll be unavailable.

Lesson 5: Keep building and publishing

Finally, WattWise validated my reason for starting this blog. Over the years I’ve built many interesting things without sharing them publicly. Seeing people interested in and engaging with my work is deeply satisfying. I’ll keep publishing things I build for myself, and hopefully they end up being useful to others too.

Some Wins

The project ended up getting featured on the following global websites organically:

1. tomshardware.com - US
2. Hackster.io - US
3. Hackaday.com - US
4. cnx-software.com - US
5. golem.de - German
6. pcgameshardware.de - German
7. hwupgrade.it - Italian

Analytics: WattWise effect on the blog

• Total visitors: 5830
• Total views: 6173
• Bounce rate: 95%
• Avg visit duration: 15s
• Top 5 countries: USA, Germany, UK, Canada, Netherlands
• Visitors from unique countries: 103!!
• Browsers: Chrome 45%, iOS Safari 21%, Firefox 11%
• Operating systems: Android 31%, iOS 28%, macOS 20%

Surprising facts (to me):

1. There were more visitors from New York City than San Francisco
2. Only 3% of the total visitors checked out my other posts
3. Hackernews accounted for the majority of the views - 69%; Hackaday was the close second with 21%
4. Someone visited using their Windows Mobile device!

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