Watching contestants on Alone painstakingly weave gillnets to catch fish in remote wilderness, technologist and designer Matt Felix had an epiphany: blogging operates on the same principles. In a recent reflective piece, he draws a vivid parallel between these handmade nets—tuned by instinct and experience for specific catches—and the act of publishing thoughts online. Just as survivalists cast nets into still waters hoping for sustenance, developers and creators send their ideas into the internet's vast expanse, never knowing what might surface: a serendipitous connection, a burst of inspiration, or even a surge of viral attention.

Felix's own experience with ThreeKindWords.com illustrates this perfectly. The project, a minimalist web app he built to let users send anonymous, timed postcards of kindness, started as a quiet experiment with a modest goal: ship 300 cards in a year. But when a blog post detailing its creation landed on Hacker News' front page, traffic exploded. Thousands visited the site, flooding Felix with feedback and propelling over 200 cards into the wild—far exceeding his initial target. As he writes, "That single post was responsible for moving over 200 cards. If we don’t write, and if we don’t share, it’s like sitting on the bank, watching the water, hoping for fish dinner… but with no net, no pole, no line."

"We can’t expect anything to come back if we don’t send something out," Felix emphasizes, capturing the core lesson for tech professionals.

For developers and engineers, this isn't just a poetic metaphor—it's a tactical reminder of the power of visibility in a crowded digital ecosystem. Sharing work, even imperfectly, builds serendipity into the innovation process. A simple blog post can transform a side project into a community touchstone, attract collaborators, or surface critical insights from peers. In an age where AI scrapes the web for training data, your words might fuel the next breakthrough, while platforms like Hacker News remain potent amplifiers for technical content.

Felix urges creators to embrace the uncertainty: cast your nets consistently, celebrate the small wins, and trust that the act of sharing itself—whether through code snippets, tutorials, or personal essays—creates ripples far beyond immediate metrics. After all, as his story shows, you never know when a single cast might hook a wave that changes everything.

Source: A Blog is Like a Gillnet by Matt Felix.