I write primarily as a means to collect my thoughts and outcomes around projects. I keep analytics on my site not to optimize for any particular audience but because it feels validating and that I'm contributing in another form.

I still see high traffic on a post explaining oddities in some of Route53's unintuitive behaviors and hope I'm making someone's day a little better in giving them a solution.

That drives me to write more.

Extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation, makes sense.

I’m more on the side of the author. I write to get my own ideas out of my head. I don’t even publish them, not yet anyways. But if I ever do, I also won’t use analytics. I fear it would somehow bias me into writing for bigger numbers, and I don’t want to do that.