One viral article and now I feel like an imposter

I have been writing on Medium passively for a long time and boom suddenly one of the article went “sort of viral” — now I feel like an imposter!

Backstory

I have been blogging passively on Medium and my personal blog for a long time. I work full time at Google as a Senior Software Engineer and on areas like computational photography and Android Camera. And this used to be my consistent writing niche — Android Camera, Camera hardware, optimized algorithms and sometimes about a QR code library I maintain open source. By January 2022 I had like 64 followers and roughly a monthly income of 10$.

I was happy and content — as it would help me cover what I pay Medium for reading.

One evening after work, I was scrolling through my Medium feed and stumbled upon an article with following title

The Best Programming Language To Learn in 2022? — Google Lead Developer Explains

Given my background I was intrigued — Who’s this author? What’s their message to the readers?

The article is now deleted & I think the author was never a Googler either (I looked it up) — but everything aside, I hated the message he delivered. The author recommended “Python” as “the language for 2022” with a vague rationale. I don’t hold anything against Python per se, the issue was the lack of rationale and vagueness.

For some reason this really pissed me off. Maybe it was the wrong message or the question itself. I have often been asked the same question and I hold a very different opinion on it. It could also have been the “click bait-ish” nature of the title.

I started ranting about it to my wife and then sat on my desk and went to medium.com > Stories > Write a story and started writing the rants!

I finished the article under 30 minutes, had my wife give it a read and hit “publish”. Honestly writing this article felt nice — to some level it allowed me to surface my anger and tell the story in my own way. Given how things used to be I didn’t expect many readers to read it anyway.

For some reason — it felt like telling a story to myself.

And then I was contacted by an editor

The story had some views, I wasn’t paying much attention to it and after a couple of days Anupam Chugh — an editor at Better Programming reached out, over a private comment. Apparently, he found the article worthy of being published in the publication.

Honestly I didn’t know what publications were in Medium terms. I decided to give it a try . The editors helped clean up the article and published it.

I was happy that my article is now listed on some publication with 200K+ followers.

I told my wife about it and later went back to my normal life….

And then something happened and there was a sudden interest in the story

I don’t know what really triggered it, but suddenly one day I saw getting more hits on the articles. Readers started highlighting my article line by line. I am humbled to see a major portion of the article now highlighted. More and more readers started to follow me and the article started to make serious dollars.

More than everything — readers clapped and some of them agreed to the message while others didn’t. I think what I felt about the question resonated with some readers.

I really felt honoured by the time people spent reading it, whether they agreed with it or not.

+1, I am glad!

Fast forward

The article now has 86000+ views, 470 hours+ reading time and has made more than 2000$. I now have 840+ followers and growing. Since then I have published couple of more articles on the publication.

I am afraid my wife thinks I am good at this. I am not!

But?

This particular article was outside of my original niche. I am more used to writing long articles about very specific topics like computational photography or writing high performance algorithms on Android or how camera hardware works. But I often had fewer readers interested in these topics. Here’s an example

And now I feel conflicted!

Between writing about what majority of readers may find interesting vs what I care about most. I am in the end, an engineer who is “probably” good at building apps but not so much at writing great articles.

If you have read until here, you must have figured out this is yet another rant article.

I feel like an imposter in the universe where really fantastic, engaging articles are written by talented authors. And soon enough, those who follow me would realize this and only a few may find my writing interesting. I have started questioning every drafts I have — is this good enough? Is there any story at all to read in this one?

What am I gonna do?

I have honestly enjoyed writing here on Medium as well as in my personal blog. I have enjoyed writing both deep technical articles as well as general topics where I receive more engagement.

In future, I want to be at a place where I could call this fear of mine as “imposter syndrome” — because that would mean I am not really one.

I plan to continue to read and write here more often and hopefully get to the place I wanna be. Until I get there, I’ll probably have to bear the fear every time I hit “publish” button.

Julio Vincent mentioned in this article

I just try to do my best, and to write in the moment each week. If 10 people read it this week, great. If 100 people read it, that’s great too. I try to contain my emotional experience to the story I’m writing in the moment — rather than comparing.

I would like to get there too. If readers continue to follow me, I’d like to be a useful author to them.

Thanks

Thanks for reading this article. Thanks for reading my other articles if you have, it has been both humbling and motivating.

If you have been here or have tips for me, I would really love to read them!

Why did I write this article

I was reading this article published on Medium Creators

Which reminded me of the emotions I had when I wrote the “sort of viral” article. It reminded me to

Write from a place that sparks any emotion: happiness, joy, anger, resentment, disappointment, sadness, glee.

So I wrote this up, once again to tell myself — my story.