100 Posts

It has been more than a decade since I put my first website online. Well, four websites.

Each one taught me something the next one needed. A couple went live to a small thrill and then went quiet; one I took down myself, the night a friend found it. The fourth is the one you're reading. This is the story of all four, and the 99 posts that came before this one.

(On this site, anyway. The other three didn't all make the move; thatFruitThing alone ran to about 40 posts that never got ported. Count every site and it clears 140.)

Humble Beginnings

I started writing on the internet in 2014: a curious freshman with a new laptop and an itch to build something. So I did.

thatFruitThing

2014–2016. Around 40 posts about Apple, one WordPress install, and most of the web development I know.

thatFruitThing was where I wrote about Apple. I was living through an interesting era: iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple Watch, Apple Pay, the 12-inch MacBook. I'd gotten my first iPhone and Mac the year before, and I wanted to document all of it. Over two years it grew to around 40 posts, most of them short takes on whatever Apple had just shipped.

My friend Amit walked me through the first server: WordPress on Bluehost. I geeked out. I read the plugin marketplace at 2am chasing features I wanted, and tuned the design well past the point of reason. Pretty much all of my web development experience comes from here.

Then the shine wore off. As I moved through my computer science degree, I wanted to write about what I was learning, and my interest had spread from one company to a whole industry. None of that fit tidily under a name like thatFruitThing.

The ending was abrupt. A friend found me in the cafeteria, told me he'd discovered the site, and called me an Apple fanboy. He wasn't wrong. But it knocked something loose. The site wasn't getting the attention it deserved, and I decided it was better to take it down than let it rot. It came down that night.

A few of those posts survived the move here:

• Into the Rabbit Hole of Markdown Editors
• Apps of 2014
• Apple Keynote: September 9th, 2014
• Breakdown of My Homescreen
• iOS 8 Guide

Answer Keychain

2014–2015. Quiz answers traded for ad money: $5 a month out, under $20 in two years, never enough to cash out.

Answer Keychain came out of the freelance work I was doing around the same time. I was on oDesk, which ran certification quizzes you could take to earn badges for your profile. When I finished one, I'd post the answers here. (I was also playing a lot of Trivia Crack.)

I hoped it might cover my server costs, so it became my first experiment with ads. The site cost $5 a month to run. Over two years it made less than $20, which isn't even enough to get paid: AdSense doesn't release a cent until you clear $100. I spent my days refreshing the analytics and the ads dashboard to watch a handful of visitors trickle in. I was trying to ride the Google search wave, in a crowded niche, with no promotion. It was built to fail. But it was a side project, and it taught me I needed a better approach.

My freelance career stalled after a summer, and the site stalled with it. Both petered out for the same reason: my heart wasn't in it. I'd put in the hours, learned the lesson, and was ready to move on.

Frenetic Array

2016–2020. A couple dozen posts on computer science, the Ghost-on-DigitalOcean stack I never left, and one rewrite I never finished.

Frenetic Array was a reflection of its time: a computer science student halfway through his coursework, leaving no intellectual stone unturned. And did I have opinions to share.

By then I was comfortable with web tech, and I wanted to spend my time on the writing instead of the plumbing. So I moved to the stack I still use today: Ghost on a DigitalOcean server. Ten years later, both are still here. This is where I learned to explain a hard idea in plain language, which turned out to be the most durable skill the site ever gave me.

Its downfall was self-inflicted. My Ghost install went stale, two major versions behind. My theme was being deprecated and needed a port to something current. I wanted to move from FreneticArray.com to starikov.co. So I decided to start over from scratch. And never finished. Seriously. RIP.

The best of it, in rough order:

• On Being Passionate About Tools
• An Evolutionary Approach to Problem Solving
• On Understanding, Not Just Memorizing
• The Monty Hall Problem
• Painting Gabriel's Horn

The Blog Lives On

2024–today. The one that stuck. A post a week, a month of backlog, and a streak I won't break.

This blog has an odd origin. At work, I set up an internal page for the things I kept sharing: my resume, links to Ukrainian donation funds, a few documents people kept asking for. I figured I'd take it down if I ever left.

Then the tech layoffs started, and it occurred to me that leaving isn't always your call. I rethought what belonged on company infrastructure, and personal content wasn't it. It took a year, but I moved all of it here. (The work material now lives in a Google Doc, shared with my current and former teams.) These are my own words, not my employer's; the disclosures page covers the rest. After the move, the site sat parked and untouched for another year.

It's no accident that most of my writing lines up with the moment I started using coding agents. Not because I use them to write the posts, because I don't. The opposite, really. I love writing; I hated publishing. Writing is the pure part. Publishing was a pile of clicks in a CMS: copy the content over, set every field, check it twice. I automated everything except the writing, which means I get to write more.

Starting a blog the same season those tools matured felt like cheating. A feature I wanted took a day or two instead of a weekend. When something annoyed me, I no longer had to hunt through CSS to patch it. The site is more polished than I could have made it alone, which freed me to focus on the part that matters: writing.

For every project before this one, I never shared the work anywhere, so traffic was roughly nobody. This time I knew I had to do it differently. I had to promote my own writing: to get it in front of people now, to bring in subscribers over time, and to build the slow, compounding pile of backlinks that search engines reward. The promotion adds up, and I've watched it pay off. It's genuinely good to see something you wrote land for someone, big or small. That, to me, is what the writing is for.

A few of those promotions found an audience I never expected:

• 850 pages of my CS notes, on r/learnprogramming
• the zero-width space, on r/webdev
• a Ukraine donation one-pager, on r/ukraine
• RSS as my everything app, on r/rss

It's been an emotional roller coaster. The highs are real: honest feedback, a reader who enjoyed the thing, proof that what you wrote mattered. But I could never guess which post would do well. The ones I was sure were bangers sank without a trace, which stings. It gets me down sometimes. I bounce back.

One thing is certain: it has paid off.

Since I started writing consistently, from April 2025 to today, the numbers look like this:

• 14k users
• 35k views
• 20 members

To me, that points to a bright future. I think I'm keeping this one.

Lessons Learned

Every website was a lesson. They stack into the site you're reading now.

thatFruitThing

Start anything. Write like nobody's watching. At first it all feels like it isn't good enough. But you don't need everything figured out at the start — you're a beginner, like I was. You work it out as you go.

Start anywhere. The opening decision paralysis is real: CMS, host, domain, registrar, on and on. What matters is that you start somewhere. Anywhere. You'll refine the stack until it fits.

Answer Keychain

It's not about the metrics. Refreshing the analytics and ad dashboards got me nothing but a slower pulse. What I should have refreshed was the writing, asking what moved the needle for me instead of for the search algorithm. Which leads to:

Do what you love. Just because you can do a thing, should you? When I'm unsure whether to commit to a project, I sleep on it. A good idea today is still a good idea tomorrow.

Frenetic Array

Have fun. Frenetic Array was fun, which is why it outlasted the rest. I wrote whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. That's what writing should be: your own expression. Not every essay has to be a greatest hit; it just has to matter enough to you to share.

STAR🌻KOV

Consistency is key. Pick a cadence and hold it. thatFruitThing was a post a day, and I burned out. Frenetic Array was a post a week, each one heavily academic, and I burned out. Now it's a post a week on whatever I want, with about a month of backlog. That's sustainable. Some weeks I don't write at all, but the schedule holds, and there's a streak to keep.

Self-promote. This was the hardest one for me. It feels like a needle of joy in a haystack of rejection. But it's a signal worth reading. What worked? What got clicks? It's learning in production. Don't be shy. Show people what you've got.

My Next Milestone

Someday I'd like to reach 1,000 posts here. At a post a week, that's about 17 years out. Yikes. I'll check back in before then.

The next milestone is simpler: write one post a week until I can't.