

My weekly newsletter about LLVM/Clang has been running for one year - asb
http://llvmweekly.org/issue/52

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asb
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051572)
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1v4lbi/llvm_wee...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1v4lbi/llvm_weekly_summarising_developments_in_the_world/).
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.

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

~~~
RBO2
+1 LLVM is a background topic for me. Your newsletter is both informative and
joyful on my Monday morning.

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dochtman
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.

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fredleblanc
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!

~~~
asb
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.

~~~
fredleblanc
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).

