Goodbye HEY World, hello Substack
Why I moved my writing, what I was missing, and what to expect next
Note: You are receiving this because you were subscribed to my writing on HEY World. I’ve moved to Substack and imported the subscriber list, so you don’t lose access to future posts. You can unsubscribe at any time.
I’ve been writing on HEY World for a while. It’s a refreshingly simple way to blog: send an email to world [at] hey dot com, and it becomes an article with an RSS feed people can subscribe to, like a newsletter.
I enjoyed it enough that I recently imported all my HEY posts into my own domain.
Why changing, then?
There are a few reasons I want to change the platform I use to publish content. I want:
A better experience for my writing. I’m a heavy user of (good?) formatting, and not being able to use different headings or not having captions for images was a pain. This comes first because I write for myself first. To share my learnings and condense them in a written form.
A better experience for my readers. Substack comes with an app, and it’s pleasing to read posts here. Other big newsletters, like “The Pragmatic Engineer” and “Scarlet Ink,” use it.
My own domain. Non-negotiable. The web is increasingly a walled garden, but I still want a way out. Currently, because my posts are imported from “HEY” into my domain, I need to state that the “canonical URL” is the one in “HEY”. Not nice for search engines and discoverability.
Features like stats, surveys, and monetization. I need to understand what my audience is — even if, again, I write for myself — where they come from, whether a newsletter mentioned my articles, etc. I also want an easy way to distribute free content to my readers. While Substack does not excel at it, I can do it by creating a survey and letting people subscribe. In “HEY”, I need to put a link to a Google Form and import the email after. Bad UX for users, more work for me.
Still, this move is not just about tooling. It changes how I write, how often I publish, and how you read and interact with the content.
What can I expect?
As you can see from my blog stats, I’m not the most consistent writer. That is, in part, because I tend to prefer sprints over marathons and because my brain is wired that way. I’m trying to change that and force myself to push content out there. You can expect:
Articles about software engineering, tech leadership, and engineering management. I’m currently writing a series for Tech Leads, paired with a book. So far, I’ve written two pieces in English:
I’m a Tech Lead, and nobody listens to me. What should I do?
Coming soon: “Operational Excellence, the Tech Leads’ lever”
Startups and how they operate
Processes, culture, and productivity in engineering teams
Important trends in the technology industry
I’m not committing to an exact number of articles yearly. I also write in Spanish, and sometimes the articles will be a translation one way or the other. But I’m trying to keep original content in both.
The difference is that this is now the place where everything lives. One domain, one archive, one feed you can rely on. If you’ve found value in my writing before, you’ll find it here too.
— João