2021 in numbers

Last updated May 5, 2024 Published Dec 24, 2021

The content here is under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license

Join Our Community

Connect with developers, architects, and tech leads who share your passion for quality software development. Discuss TDD, architecture, software engineering, and more.

→ Join Slack

2021 was a different year for me, taking the time to write more than I did last year, code more and learn a bunch of things that I didn’t know. In this blog post I will try to resume what the year was for me in numbers. You might be asking, which numbers? From where?

Those numbers are essentially from: blog posts I wrote, goodreads, from wakatime and google analytics. Wakatime is a tool that I use on the daily basis to track where I am spending my time, in which projects and in which programming languages. Goodreads is the social network I use to keep progress on what I am reading - It keeps me on track and focused in finishing what I have started, and last but not least, google analytics is the tool I use to see page views, user engagement, behavior from this website.

I divided this post in basically 4 sections: writing, reading, coding and talks. For each section, I am going to depict what 2021 looked like and share the data from the tools mentioned. As always, any feedback is appreciated!

Note: the time range I used to depicts the data is from January 1st 2021 till December 28th 2021.

Writing

Starting with writing, this year was the one I published the most, compared with 2020 - I more than doubled the number of posts. In 2020 I wrote 17 posts, and in 2021, 38 - If we count this one, it would be 39.

Having a look at what I wrote during the year some things caught my attention. Starting with the AWS post series, which is a collection of posts on the Certified Cloud Practitioner, there I go over the resources I used to get certified. In total, I wrote 10 posts around, each covering a different section of the exam.

For my suprise, those were the most viewed posts during in 2021, I wrote them while studying to take my own certification - this one surprised me, as the subject that I wrote the most during the year was related to testing, nonetheless, testing is not a popular subject in here, at least for 2021 - I will try to focus a bit more on that and see what 2022 will bring around that.

The second most viewed post is: SIM800L tracking your IoT device. Followed by MySQL 5.7 on Ubuntu 19.04 and 19.10. It seems that using MySQL on ubuntu is still an issue. Also, I think that both are posts that I wrote while I couldn’t find any help myself. Which interesting enough made them the most popular after two years that I published them.

On the other hand, I also kept some old posts updated, adding more info or just building up on my own understanding of the things I wrote1234.

Reading

This yeas was the first that I could finish the good reads challenge, in total I read 14 books, most of them are tech related. In 2020 I almost reached this mark but I read 9 out of 12. For more info on 2020 challenge, I wrote a blog post with the books I read.

Not only I read more books, but I also blogged about the ones I enjoyed the most, for example, Accelerate held the spotlight followed by eXtreme programming 2nd edition. I also noticed that there are books I read off and I didn’t track them in good reads:

Coding

Regarding coding I also touched different programming languages and frameworks that weren’t related to my main tech stack - starting with kotlin, python and azure, nonetheless, I also kept writing side projects in typescript. On writing code I also started a few side projects:

In the coding side of things I would highlight the kata group, in 2021 we started to write some code together to practice mainly TDD.

  • Katas live - in total we did 8 katas and some of them we did twice in different programming languages.
  • Katas - I also have my solo journey on katas, in which I kept in a separated repository.

I use wakatime for tracking my coding activity and this years wasn’t different - even though I noticed that some of my environments weren’t configured properly to collect this information. Anyways, while coding I spent my time on linux, my most used editor was vs code and I had an accumulative of 861 hours coding starting from January 1st till December 28th - the most used programming language I wrote is as follows:

  1. Javascript
  2. TypeScript
  3. Markdown
  4. PHP
  5. YAML
  6. JSON
  7. HTML
  8. VueJs
  9. Docker
  10. Python

Having markdown as the third most used language I used in the year, points to the outcome I state before about doubling the number of posts. By blog, is written in jekyll - which uses markdown to generate an static web site.

Talks

Compared to 2020, in 2021 I gave tree talks more, in total 4. In general, in 2021 I see a trend in which I focused more towards testing instead of a broad topics, this trend started already in 2020, but in 2021 is the year that it became clear.

Footnotes

  1. Software architecture patterns ↩

  2. Production-Ready microservices ↩

  3. How to lose your developers ↩

  4. Terraform HashiCorp certification ↩

You also might like

Made with 💖 by @MatheusMarabesi