I think the key with a post like this is the tone. If you're writing a "my first experience trying X", you should avoid trying to sound like you have any advice to give or lessons learned. You don't know what lessons you've learned until much later. If he'd wrote it from the learner's perspective, it would have been a much more interesting read.

We all had experiences like the author's during our first try at this. I made just as many mistakes from just as many bad assumptions on my first for-profit site. The thing is, I waited several years until I had some perspective before I was ready to write that experience up in a way that would be useful to other people.

[edit: this is the article I refer to: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2007/01/6-things-that-kill... . You can only imagine how comical it would have sounded had I spouted off about how all this stuff was going to work back when I was doing it.]