Since the middle of April 2026 I have published 67 posts on dev.to. My best one has 576 views. That is not a humble brag, it is the honest ceiling of a security developer who decided to write in public and hit publish every day for three months. I want to lay out what actually happened, with the real numbers I have, because most "how to blog" advice comes from people who skip the unglamorous middle.
The number that surprised me
My top performer is a practical Ollama guide. A how-to. Run this model locally, here is the command, here is the gotcha on WSL2. 576 views.
Meanwhile the posts I was proudest of, the deep smart contract security pieces where I actually know things most people do not, consistently pulled roughly a fifth of the traffic. Not once. As a pattern. The local-AI how-tos beat the deep security content something like five to one on views, over and over.
That stung a little, and then it taught me something. My expertise is not what most readers came for. They came for a Tuesday problem: "I want to run a model on my machine without paying for tokens and it is not working." I happen to be able to answer that clearly. The fact that I would rather talk about reentrancy is my preference, not the reader's need.
