1 million pageviews

My blog has recently reached 1 million pageviews. This warrants for a short retrospection.

I started the posting regularly on September 2010. I wanted to get into the cloud computing domain, so I needed to accumulate background on cloud computing work. I decided that as I read papers on cloud computing, I will post a summary to this blog. I thought if I could explain what I learned from the papers in my own words, I would internalize those lessons better. And if others read those summaries and benefit, that is an extra plus.

"Writing is nature's way of telling you how sloppy your thinking is." In fact, I learned a lot writing those paper reviews. Writing the reviews gave me a deeper understanding of the work done, beyond what I could achieve by passively reading them. Putting them on web was also a nice choice, because I could refer my students to some of these summaries when needed. And it turned out that I referred to those summaries myself very frequently to jog my memory. Since I have encoded the writing with my understanding, reading through my summary would get me refreshed about the important lessons from that work. Since my summaries were made available on the web, all I needed to do was google search for muratbuffalo and paper name.

(Side remark about my research journey: My research area at the first couple years of my PhD was distributed algorithms and self-stabilization. Then starting on 2002, wireless sensor networks has become my research area. I applied stabilizing distributed algorithms for in-network querying and tracking in wireless sensor networks. Around 2009 I started transitioning to crowdsourced sensing and collaboration using smartphones. And starting from 2010, I transitioned to large-scale cloud computing systems. Distributed systems has been the common theme through out. Here is a link to my research statement as of the end of 2016.)

Over time I included posts about my conference trips, book reviews, rants, and research advice for students. Putting research advice (reading, writing, presenting) is also beneficial because I can refer my students to it. And occasionally I receive emails from remote corners of the world about how some of these posts helped them or inspired them, and that makes me very happy for an entire day.

Some of the big hits 

The bursty traffic all came from Hacker News. The regular traffic came from many sources: Google searches, blog posts, twitter links.

Google tells me I can earn up to $18.50 per month by placing ads on my blog using AdSense. No thanks, for now.

Here are the top 10 posts in my blog as of now. Looks like anything mentioning Facebook is a big hit. Deep learning is also very hot. Glad to see our hybrid logical clocks work also up there. And glad to see interest for TLA+.