2021 in numbers

Last updated Dec 28, 2021 Published Dec 24, 2021

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

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:

Json tool
Omni metrics
Github stats dashboard - this one is an old one, but I gave it a bit of care, as I am writing a bit of vuejs again

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:

Javascript
TypeScript
Markdown
PHP
YAML
JSON
HTML
VueJs
Docker
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.