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Happier New Technological Year

A summary of my year as a blogger and Youtuber, and what goals I am to achieve in the coming year.

by Percy Bolmér, January 1, 2023

Every year I like to make a summary, of the year, from the perspective of my Blog. It is a way for me to see progress and make new goals for my writing and blogging.

It’s been a rough two years, Corona and War have dreaded the life of many.

This has taken a toll on many branches of the industry. The technology sector is not unaccounted for.

Many big tech companies are doing massive layoffs. It has affected many people.

There is a website that tracks all the layoffs, and it is pretty gore-reading. Most famous is the Twitter layoff which cut HALF its workforce. But there are many other crazy layoffs this year, Amazon dropped 10k people, Meta dropped 11k.

There still seem to be plenty of developer jobs available though, based on the number of recruiters that reach out on Linkedin. If you aren’t using Linkedin, I really recommend it. I didn’t think Linkedin worked, to be honest, but since joining I’ve gotten so many job offers that I no longer even respond to them.

This Years Goals For My Blogging

At the beginning of this year, I made a list of my goals. The list looked like this, copied from my last year’s New Year Post.

• 1000 followers on Medium (590 to go)
• Finished at least one writer’s course
• Published 100 articles (Yes, that is a major increase from now)
• Found 10 mindblowing use cases for the new Generics in Go
• Reach 525k views on Medium (That is 350k new views and would be twice as much from 2021)
• Reach 50k views on ProgrammingPercy.tech

In hindsight, I realize that these goals were very high, but I like having hard goals.

Before I can make new goals, I need to see if the old goals were successful and bring see the Live metrics to know what I should strive for.

• 1000 followers on Medium - Failure, At this point I only have 894.
• F̶i̶n̶i̶s̶h̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶t̶ ̶l̶e̶a̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶w̶r̶i̶t̶e̶r̶’̶s̶ ̶c̶o̶u̶r̶s̶e̶ - I Actually took a Course! A Course on how to structure online tutorials, and got some good insights that I hope can make me improve
• Published 100 articles - Failure, I only have 60 published Articles! (There is a big reason for this failure, which I will cover soon)
• F̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶1̶0̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶d̶b̶l̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶s̶e̶s̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶e̶w̶ ̶G̶e̶n̶e̶r̶i̶c̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶G̶o̶ - Wow, Generics has really improved many of my code bases. Sorting algorithms, Removing Type Switching and Reflection, Better Queues, etc.
• Reach 525k views on Medium - Yikes, Big Failure here. This is my current view count.

* R̶e̶a̶c̶h̶ ̶5̶0̶k̶ ̶v̶i̶e̶w̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ProgrammingPercy.tech. - Last year I opened my own blog to focus on, and It went much better than I thought!

Was This Year A Failure?

So in total, 3/6 of my goals were reached. Normally I would consider this a big failure, but there are a few reasons why I failed on some of them.

It all comes down to time, and how time is spent.

The blog that I published used a template website that kinda sucked, and I spent much time rebuilding my blog in SvelteKit this year. That was one of the things that drained much time for me, reducing the number of articles I had time to write.

Apart from rebuilding my Website, I also decided to start a Youtube Channel, ProgrammingPercy.

My YouTube is a place where I record my articles and tutorials and publish them as videos, satisfying the readers who want video format instead.

Not only did I have to learn how to record videos, but I also had to learn how to Edit and fix the videos. And this took a long time, my first video took around 2 weeks to record, edit and fix. 

After three videos I almost gave up, they were very rough to watch, kinda sucked, and had taken a long to record. 

I have improved the quality of my videos a lot since then I think. I have also increased the time it takes to create the videos, which is now much faster. 

Recording oneself talking is very hard, listening to myself kinda makes me wanna puke sometimes.

New Year & New Resolutions

It has been a year of quality, and by that, I mean that I have spent much time increasing my blog’s quality, and learning how to make better videos. Now that I have that in place, I want to focus on creating more content. 

This will be the year of content creation for me. I have really gotten a boost in how much fun I think it is to create tutorials and help others learn. I cannot wait for all the stuff I want to create (I have a backlog of about 80 articles by now, and it keeps growing).

Some people have reached out for certain topics, and many people request a Hexagonal Architecture tutorial, and I think combining it with the Domain Driven architecture would serve as a great tutorial, So I have begun forging the idea for one.

What is a new year without a few resolutions? 

In 2023, apart from performing well in the New Job that I’ve taken, I want to achieve the following for my blogging.

• 550k Views On Medium - I think I will keep the old Views (525k) but bump it up to 550k. It seems harder than I thought :)
• 500k Views on ProgrammingPercy - So my first year on my own Blog got 170k views, I think aiming for 500k is reasonable in 2023!
• 1500 Followers on Medium - Since I will be forging more content I hope to reach even more people.
• 1000 Subscribers on Youtube - I want to have 1000 Subscribers on Youtube by the end of the year, I think this is setting the bar rather low, but I gotta have something to cross off next year!
• 100 Articles - Having 100 Articles, same as this year. The reason is that with CrossPosting on My blog and Medium, Recording the Videos, the amount of time to post an article is a lot longer.

I really hope to make the most of these goals, And I will work hard for it. When I began blogging I don’t think I realized how much work that goes into a tutorial. 

It is really hard making good tutorials, not saying my tutorials are good, but some of them have their highlights I believe. Finding an intriguing path that is easy to follow for the reader is really a hard task.

Thank you for reading my rambling, and if you are one of my followers, thank you for all the support I have gotten through the Year.

I hope you will have a happy new year, and hopefully, it will be a better year for most people.

What are you going to do to make your year better? 

Do you have any goals you want to achieve?