10 Years Of Medium In 10,000 Words
Turns out, all you need is a corner of the internet that encourages your own unique flavour of weird…
On the 23rd of July 2014, I joined Medium. On a whim, I decided to type my email address into an input field on this up-and-coming blogging platform I knew nothing about. Seconds later, I verified my email address, and I was a Medium user. Just like that. Planet Earth was spinning at its regular speed, the Irish summer sun was just as elusive as ever. It was an ordinary Wednesday, until it wasn’t. Until I registered on Medium.
I didn’t really have much of a plan, if any. For all intents and purposes, it was just another blogging site. I’ve done Blogger, I’ve done Tumblr, I’ve done WordPress. I hosted my own blog. I coded my own blog. I’ve sat at the helm of other people’s blogs. Blogger, webmaster, web developer. In that order. In terms of writing, there really wasn’t much under the sun I haven’t seen or worked with on the web. Seen them all, built them all, used them all to finally ditch them… all. Because they were shite.
Medium was different. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it felt novel. Barebones, but definitely not shite.
This was less than two years after Medium’s 2012 inception, and I’ll be honest, it wasn’t the site’s design that caught my attention. I remember it trying to use negative space a lot, just not very successfully, far-far less successfully than today, 10 years later. But unpolished design aside, it had a certain identity — an identity that had potential, one that, I felt, was worth keeping an eye on, so I stayed and read stuff once in a while. Stuff from people like me, people very different from me, and everything in-between.
2014 was a big year for me. I managed to land my first full-time commercial software engineering job on the Emerald Isle. I will never forget the interview. I was ridiculously overdressed. It was a small startup in Belfast creating digital assets and experiences for tabletop games (boardgames). I tried to “sell” myself, the CEO — Andrew — tried to “sell” the company to me. An hour later we met in the middle with a handshake and a contract ready for the signing. Today, Andrew is my best friend, and while the company evaporated into thin air and fond memories within a year, we both gained a granite-solid friendship.
2015 brought with it even more change. In fact, so much change, I had to double-check my LinkedIn. I had three jobs in three different software development companies. I began the year still at the failing tabletop gaming startup, continued in Ed-Tech, and ended at the oldest publisher in the US — Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — while also getting promoted from junior software engineer to regular software engineer spiced up with a 2-week hiatus of jobless panic, contemplating moving to either New York or Copenhagen.
People say, as an adult, you’re supposed to know what you want. Bullshit. For that, you’d have to grow up, and growing up is boring, so I’d rather not know what I want and try more things…
Like doing a cross-Romanian trip and visiting granddad on a whim. That was the last time I saw him. 😢 That same trip inspired parts of my novel, released 9 years later. That’s the thing about doing things on a whim once in a while. They might just gain meaning and purpose only in hindsight.
Having moved to Dublin in early 2016, I had a front-row square-foot view to what an authentic St. Patrick’s Day looked like. Messy, loud and incredibly alcohol-infused. Much prefer the lush green countryside of the Emerald Isle than the cheap polyester greens of the parade.
When not exploring my new home, I was knee-deep in LEGO bricks. I’ve never given up on the hobby, but 2016 was definitely the year of a major resurgence. In fact, now that I think of it, this was the year when I took up three activities that I still do to this day: LEGO, beer discovery and writing on Medium.
After two years of just being a Medium reader, I decided to also write.
The intent was nothing other than trying to immortalise the steps of setting up a PHP7 server on a Raspberry Pi 3. It wasn’t meant to be anything but reference material for myself and perhaps others if they found it useful. To this day, it has exactly 1 clap, and was read 110 times in 8 years.
2017 was a year of many first experiences. I have always loved the all-female Irish Celtic Woman musical ensemble, and I finally got to experience it alongside 10,000 or so other fans. It was particularly memorable to see Éabha McMahon in person, to this day, my favourite member of the group. Just two months later, I also got to experience the sensation of homeownership. Just a few years earlier, I had very little hope of ever owning my place. I was in every way in a very different place. Finally, at the beginning of that same year, I became “viral” for the first time on Medium. My “Coding Has Become Pop Culture” story caught fire, raking in — if my memory serves me right — roughly 10,000 views in a week or so, over 1000 claps from 745 readers, and 170 followers and in 2017, I discovered the power of Medium publications. David Smooke, owner of HackerNoon, quickly jumped on the story and made sure to feature it in his publication.
I can’t deny I started seeing more in Medium than just the place where I can read tech and engineering stories or log my own little web development or LEGO experiments.
I started treating it less as a blogging platform and more of a publishing platform. You might think that’s just semantics at the end of the day, but hear me out, it’s really not. It prepared me for what we know today as the Boost.
I found myself writing differently, turning my drafts into craft, positioning myself as a sort of columnist on Medium and became one of the first people to pay for what they called it back then — a founding membership.
If there is one thing that truly stands out about 2018, that’s people, human connections. I have never visited so many people since, and I have never had so many visitors over ever before or after. Some were entirely new people in my life. There was this girl I met on Tinder while visiting my folks in Romania. We kept chatting and a couple of months later she popped over to Dublin for a long weekend of amazing moments. At one point, the bus from The Giants’ Causeway broke down in a village, so we went to a pub for some pints and live music in the beer garden followed by a detour to Belfast for a nice glass of Bushmills. These are the moments we live for… 🎵
And then there was 2019. Oh boy. Not a year I was prepared for. Flew to Boston, then took the train to New York where while at a birthday party, I met a couple who met on Hinge. Seemed like a good idea and just weeks later I was on a date that sent me spiralling unlike anything or anyone ever before. So I sat down and wrote. A novel. 300 pages of it. In just 6 months. All the while trying to keep it together. I wasn’t very successful, and if 2018 was about making connections, 2019 became about breaking connections. It’s a miracle I still had the mental space to publish 8 Medium stories that year.
Like all art, writing is a great release mechanism, and when all else felt like crumbling around me, the words were there make sense of it all.
2020 was exactly as everyone else remembers it. The world was collectively prepared for virtually none of it. Looking back, I am somewhat surprised that we didn’t entirely self-destruct as a species, as a civilisation. I’ve never seen Dublin that empty. Never before or after have I had an unhindered leisurely walk in this city. As grim as the situation was, the quietness of Dublin wasn’t entirely unwelcome. I used to date an Irish girl back then, and we’d have to walk 3.5 km each to meet half-way, as the travel limit was 5 km and every time we saw the Gardai (Irish Police), we’d change direction to avoid being questioned. It was unbelievable. Kissing came with a risk of actual death. 😮 We did it anyway. 😊
Many years ago, while living in Spain, jobless, lifeless, futureless, I promised myself, if I am ever in the situation to give back and make someone else’s life better, I’ll do it, I’ll do whatever it takes to know at least one person has a better life because of me. In 2021, I got an opportunity to act on that promise and helped a friend move to Dublin with accommodation, job, and food provided. Naive me thought that just following what worked for me, what got me a stable life, will work just as well for someone else. It didn’t, and I learned a valuable lesson.
Most people want success, few people are truly willing to work for it.
I also learned that I should listen for a change to my own advice. I kept suggesting to my friend to write on Medium, go behind the paywall. She had countless stories in her, but zero stamina and perseveration. I, on the other hand, kept writing all these years for free, and had an audience of over 1200 followers. So, towards the end of October 2021, I went behind the paywall. The goal was simple — find out if I can make enough with writing to buy myself a new MacBook Pro worth roughly 3,500 euros. It didn’t take a year. It took just 5 months.
2022 became largely about Medium and my new job as staff engineer at Prezi. Medium-wise I was very concerned going behind the paywall would reduce my readership, but somehow it ended up tripling in size, while Prezi turned out to be everything I was missing as a senior engineer in my previous job. Seeing success both on Medium and at Prezi, however, might have turned me into a bit of a workaholic.
Somehow everything I love doing, sooner or later, becomes a source of income. 😅
Programming started as a hobby, writing and building with LEGO bricks both started as hobbies as well, and in 2022 I suddenly found myself unable to stop working because subconsciously I wasn’t really working — I was just doing all the things I loved doing. Except when I travelled. I call that active resting. Having successfully dealt with my 2019 “midlife crisis at 34”, I started repairing old friendships. Lisbon was probably the highlight of that year and seeing an old friend after 20 years. If you’re in the area, you must go and visit Sintra — the most magical place, only a 30-minute train ride away from Lisbon. Manali in her 8-minute story does it much better justice than I can here, in two sentences.
Having received my Irish citizenship at the very end of 2022, 2023 started with a massive load off my shoulders. It was the first year I felt like I had truly achieved something I had worked towards all my life — feeling truly at home somewhere. I was finally able to leave behind the multigenerational Hungarian trauma I was carrying for over three decades. It gave space to a lot of clarity and focus. I was able to sit back and just be myself and by myself for a while.
Being yourself is an incredibly relaxing and inspiring state. I wish I learnt that sooner.
I finally found the energy to take my 2019 draft novel and work towards publishing it. But this time I asked for help. At this point, I was old enough to realise I’m not supposed to do everything by myself. Andi, Robin, Matilde, a million thank yous won’t cover it.
And finally, we’re in the present. 2024 saw me releasing my novel and shifting back my focus to Medium. I had to admit that taking a step back and working more on my stories, improving my craft, doubling down on the niches I had true expertise in, was what worked for me. I still create over 20 drafts a month, but I only develop and publish 3–6 stories. Those are the stories I am really proud of, and my readers’ feedback has confirmed — this is a good strategy. This is something I can build on. I don’t write for Boost, I still write because that’s how I express myself, but having the Boost guidelines in mind gives me a tangible framework for high-value writing that translates to high reader satisfaction.
2024 hasn’t ended yet, but it already taught me a lot about people, places, and situations. 10 years ago I wouldn’t have known how to turn a relationship into a friendship, or how to save an old friendship by roaming the streets and climbing the hills of Edinburgh. 10 years ago, my parents were fine, today their health is rapidly deteriorating, and I’m having to face decisions I never imagined were up to me. But as mum said it when dad was diagnosed with cancer — “everyone is part of the circle of life, do not be sad, life is meant for living”.
Don’t make life about writing, make writing about life.
A decade ago, I had one Medium follower, a decade later, that number is approaching 13,000. I had no plans or idea what to write about 10 years ago, today I have over 555 stories published, and at least as many drafts I never finished. Writer’s block is an alien concept to me, and it’s all because I was busy, and still am busy making the most of life. What I consider living life may not be everyone’s cup of tea, heck, I hope I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. I’m weird, I’m probably a workaholic, I have a love-hate relationship with humans, and apparently my humour is increasingly an acquired taste. I’m 38, but I look 50 even on a good hair day. But 10 years taught me not to care about any of that anymore.
Being unapologetically me is the best thing I can do for my writing. Read it, or skip it. I’m gonna write anyway.
And that’s it ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, aliens and superheroes, binaries, non binaries, hexadecimals and furries, spongebobs and squarepants, rounds pegs in square holes. In 10 or so photos each worth a 1000 words and a “few” notes on the side…
…the story of my Medium story. You can’t get any more meta than that. 😉
P.S. Follow me, I’m human…
Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes, blogs and books. Author. Web accessibility advocate, LEGO fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer! Read my Hello story here! Subscribe for more stories about LEGO, tech, coding and accessibility! For my less regular readers, I also write about random bits and writing.
