I enjoy Hacker Noon and often find myself coming across an interesting article on the site. Yesterday I got a pleasant surprise from an old coworker who sent me an article about building a Slack bot that mentioned of one of my blog posts. A few months earlier the author and I had a conversation in the comment thread and I’m glad she found the conversation useful enough to write a much more thorough post.

I don’t write write for publicity and genuinely enjoy the process of clarifying my thoughts through writing so it’s definitely rewarding to see a link back to my blog. It feels good knowing that my blog is interesting enough to warrant a link and it’s definitely appreciated.

Since I only discovered this backlink accidentally I got curious about how many others I missed over the years and decided to dig in. I found a free backlink checker and after searching for my domain name discovered that there are actually quite a few linkbacks. Some are list aggregators - such as top books or quantified self visualizations while others are more interesting - there are quite a few links to a 5 year old blog post about the lack of a dial tone in cell phones as well as a link from CityLab for a post about Citi Bike trip planning.

It turns out some of my posts and projects actually do make their way past my blog. It’s not much but it’s definitely cool.