I've been blogging for about 16 years. Writing is an underrated way to cement what you learn any given day or year, and over time has made it possible to reach into any part of the industry and get an actual response. Writing is particularly powerful in combination with actually doing things that (are perceived to) matter; the credibility from doing both is much higher than doing either.
Concretely answering the questions asked:
1. At various points I spent a lot of time maintaining, but now it's just a static blog deployed via Github Actions onto a Github Page. I haven't done any meaningful changes in a few years, and the changes are for fun, not necessity
4. Hard to assess, but I believe I've been able to subtly but meaningfully advance the technology industry through my writing :-)
5. A significant majority of folks are unaware that I write, and that's great! I don't think impact depends on folks connecting their colleague to the writer or whatnot
In my role as unofficial, self-appointed late-stage Digg historian [0], it's my belief that Digg ultimately had to change as the Google SEO changes had fatally wounded its near-profitability. Further, as a VC funded company it made the inevitable (and I think best for everyone involved) decision to modernize in an attempt to be a member of the Facebook, Twitter cohort rather than experience a long-term shrinking into mediocrity.
Sorry, I think that sentence was a bit unclear. What it meant to convey is that we had 200 daily active Facebook uniques, essentially that very few folks used FB to connect to Digg.
This was a focus in our after-action review. The nodes responded as healthy to active checks, while silently dropping updates on their replication lag, together this created the impression of a healthy node. The missing bit was verifying the absence of lag updates. (Which we have now.)
Concretely answering the questions asked:
1. At various points I spent a lot of time maintaining, but now it's just a static blog deployed via Github Actions onto a Github Page. I haven't done any meaningful changes in a few years, and the changes are for fun, not necessity
2. I got my first job in tech thanks to blogging: https://lethain.com/datahub/
3. My blogging has made it possible to write two pretty successful books: https://staffeng.com/book/ and https://press.stripe.com/an-elegant-puzzle (working on a third now)
4. Hard to assess, but I believe I've been able to subtly but meaningfully advance the technology industry through my writing :-)
5. A significant majority of folks are unaware that I write, and that's great! I don't think impact depends on folks connecting their colleague to the writer or whatnot