Episode 53

It’s time to do some summary of my writing up to now and lay down plans for 2017. Usually people write such articles at the end of December or beginning of January, but my article about the Hobbits journey through layers of abstraction grew a bit longer than I’ve initially anticipated and I didn’t want to interrupt the series. So here it is, in the second half of January: The story behind How To Train Your Java, some numbers, summary and further ideas.

Timeline

Every story has to begin somewhere. Let’s list some milestones the blog went through from the very beginning. One day I’ve decided, that I want  a blog. With a dragon, because why not.

2014

• August: It all started here. My initial idea was to write an enterprise application with all development infrastructure, tools, elements and all fancy stuff. I wrote twelve articles this month, mostly concerned with researching what to use for my project.
• September: I started to drift away from the initial concept, did some categorization, two articles on Java optimization and retrospectives. The pace of one article a week was established.
• October: There was a first book review, and three articles about conferences in Antwerp and London I’ve attended.
• November: Hello World’s month. Besides another book review, I wrote about basics of Spring, GWT and Vaadin.
• December: One article. That’s the moment where my motivation vanished. I lost interest in my project, and writing went down alongside.

2015

• Well, pretty much nothing happened then…

2016

• June: Episode 26. I’m back. A lot changed around back then, I started, or returned to a lot of activities and writing was among them. I’ve changed the idea of the blog. It is no longer a dead project log. It’s free now. I’m writing on whatever topic comes to mind, keeping the Java and software development theme. I started to call new articles episodes instead of entries.
• July: Episodes 27 – 28. I got a month of vacation and new job waiting for me. So I wrote down my experiences with looking for a job in programming.
• August: Episodes 29 – 32. I started to publish every Thursday. Why? Initially, because every Friday came a new JVM bloggers issue. A blog aggregator I joined. As of today, I managed to keep the pace for 26 weeks. I started to be active on Twitter then.

• September: Episodes 33 – 37. I’ve changed the JEE to Java in the name and address of the blog, and wrote first article hosted on PGS blog. At the end of September, I had a talk at Software Talks in Wrocław and Gdańsk.
• October: Episodes 38 – 42. The vampiric Halloween special was an exception from Thursday rule, coming three days early. Continuing my date with social media, I’ve created the blog’s fan page on Facebook.
• November: Episodes 43-45. A bit about seniority in programming and software craftsmanship. The latter again at PGS blog.
• December: Episodes 46-50. Traveling! I wrote reports from FutureDevDay in Gliwice and Software Talks in Rzeszów. I started a four-part Hobbit journey thorough abstraction layers, that ended a week ago.

Numb3rs

I like numbers, let’s run some numbers. The page was viewed 16487 times in 2016 in 8425 visitor sessions. The daily record was 352 on November 14. That’s quite a progress, comparing to 2752 views in 2014 and mere 1105 in 2015.

As of social media, the Facebook fan page got 577 likes in 2016, and my Twitter account went from around 20 followers in July to 265 followers at the end of the year. Some time ago I also started to post new episodes as updates on LinkedIn.

Where do people come from indirectly in 2016:

• Facebook: 3831
• Search Engines: 1424
• Netwars.pl: 633
• Software Talks: 440
• Twitter: 256
• JVM Bloggers: 190
• PGS Software: 183
• Jarosław Stadnicki blog: 79
• LinkedIn: 43
• Meetup: 29

How the traffic grew in 2016 (plus 8 days of January, because who remembers to take screenshots after New Year’s Eve party…):

Most popular episodes in 2016 were:

• Episode 43: Seniority in Programming: Part One
• Episode 44: Seniority in Programming: Part Two
• Episode 40: Building Microservices
• Episode 28: Software developer interview questions: The soft part
• Episode 39: Zawiercie Oct 2016
• Episode 34: Angular Intro

The Horizon

What’s next? I intend to keep one episode per week pace.  Currently, I have a list of around 60 ideas for future articles. Some of the random topics are: Docker and containers, Kubernetes and container orchestration, various Spring stuff, Gradle, DevOps, the cloud landscape, Internet of things, Java 9, emotional intelligence and charisma, OAuth, JVM internals, Intellij IDEA vs Eclipse, software gardening, HATEOAS, big data, logging frameworks, some book reviews, some conference relations… If you would like to read about some particular topic, don’t hesitate to let me know in comments, or any other way you can find in the author page. No promises, but we will see what can be done ;)

Also, I’m thinking about collaborating with other bloggers, so if you are keen on writing tech stuff, and would like to be guest author on How To Train Your Java, contact me. It’s not only Java, as you might have noticed up to this point, anything even remotely connected with software is welcome.

A bit late, but: I wish you happy and exciting 2017! And traditionally, see you next Thursday ;)

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