How my first medium article got 80k views in 20 days

The first article I wrote after quitting my office job gained 440 hours of member reading time, 80k views, 1k fans, and almost 4k claps.

Here is a post-mortem analysis of the article.

What programming language has the happiest developers?

What I did right

Before I jumped into being a medium writer “full-time” I wrote some articles on the side, but I’ve never entirely invested myself in it. The most-read article before that had 9k views and made only a few dollars. Only when I went all-in I was able to write this break-through article. It was literally the first article I wrote, the day after quitting my corporate job, completely dissolving my fear of being independent and confirming this is the right life path.

Research

I had an idea for this article in my to-do list. I was a Java developer before and the idea just came to me. So I googled some information about the “happiest developers”. Then I used the research data I found and made colorful graphs.