My weekly newsletter about LLVM/Clang has been running for one year | Hacker News Reader

My weekly newsletter about LLVM/Clang has been running for one year

llvmweekly.org

85 pointsasb10 comments

I thought people may be interested in this update. I started LLVM Weekly on the first Monday of 2014, and have somehow managed to get it sent out every Monday since. As of today's issue, I've managed to complete it for every Monday of 2014. If you haven't read an issue before, this week's isn't very representative - it's been a very quiet week in terms of LLVM development due to the holidays.

When I started it off, I had in mind 250 subscribers as the amount that would make it feel worthwhile to me. I decided to try to publicise it with the second issue and posted to HN and /r/programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051572 http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1v4lbi/llvm_wee.... From memory, this led to the number of subscriptions quickly rising to ~800 or so. It's hard to tell the actual number of readers given that some are subscribed directly, some read via llvmweekly.org rss, some read on the LLVM blog, and some will just read the mails on llvm-dev. There are ~2k direct subscribers to the email and feedly tells me there are ~140 people subscribed to the llvm weekly RSS and ~2k to the LLVM blog, plus there are ~1500 followers of @llvmweekly. This is all peanuts compared to your average Ruby/Python/Javascript newsletter, but of course it's a niche topic.

I'm planning to continue through 2015. It's a fair investment in time to prepare each week, but as I use LLVM/Clang in my research it is at least useful to keep on top of development. If you have any suggestions on improvements, please do share.

Your weekly is best part of my Monday morning, glad to hear it will be around in 2015 :)

Agreed, I enjoy reading it as well. Keep up the great work!

+1 LLVM is a background topic for me. Your newsletter is both informative and joyful on my Monday morning.

Agreed, thank you for maintaining this :)

I'm looking forward to and read each LLVM Weekly, great stuff! (via Twitter btw)

LLVM Weekly is a great way to keep up with what is going on in that ecosystem (plus some GCC-related stuff now and then). It's definitely something to look forward to on those awful Monday mornings...

Plus, even if I skim the llvm-dev archives, Alex tends to find interesting stuff that I missed.

That's fantastic, congrats! As someone who has been interested in both consuming newsletters and aspiring to start one maybe soon, I'd love to see more information about how much time you spend putting it all together. Is it 1-2 hours per week? 4-6? Do you have a backlog of things to include for short weeks, or do you mostly just let it happen as it happens?

Again, nice work sticking with it!

About 2-3 hours. In contrast to some other newsletters, I'm actively trying to summarise upstream development and development discussion rather than just linking to related projects. This involves reading all the mailing list posts and commits. If I came across an interesting project on Github and it's a quiet week for news/blog posts I might save it for later. Otherwise I just include it as it comes. I could certainly do a better job of summarising mailing list discussion, for an in-depth thread on a technical topic it can be very time consuming to do it justice.

That's great. In my research of what makes a good newsletter, it wholly seems to be a combination of aggregation and curation. Not just collecting links to interesting things, but highlighting what makes them interesting to you, the curator. (From there, it seems that you develop an audience of people that like your point of view).

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