Teochew Thunder: Year Ten (Part 2/2)

The readership for this blog has never been astronomical. This year was no exception, though there were some bright spots in between.

Running that race.

To be fair, I have not been putting in all that much effort, having been very much distracted by offline activity. Still, I'm proud to say that it's a race I completed, if not exceled at, at least in comparison with previous years.

The Hits

Black Mirror film reviews did well predictably (as well as anything mentioning Artificial Intelligence) such as my review of Black Mirror Series Four. It never fails to bemuse me just how well readers seem to take to my Black Mirror reviews, especially since I don't think I'm that good a film reviewer.

Smoking' hot!

Artificial Intelligence seems to be a topic of great debate these days, and for good reason. Still, when I wrote How worried should software developers be about Devin AI?, I could not have predicted that people would take this much interest. After all, just about every software developer in the world had a take on it.

Singapore's Smoking Samsui Woman Controversy Through a Web Developer's Eyes was a particularly passionate rant of my own, and a pleasant surprise it gained as much traction as it did, since I only wrote about it a full month after it had become old news.

Decent Performers

This section is for the posts that garnered a fair amount of attention, at least where the average for this blog is concerned. It's for the ones that weren't hot topics - or perhaps they were, and I didn't handle the subject all that well. Still, they deserve something of a runner's up medal.

Not too bad.

Most web tutorials fall under this category this year. They weren't big hits, but a decent number of people viewed them, especially the multi-part ones. Does this mean I should make more of those?

Ode to my Lenovo, That strange feeling that comes with achieving that prize and A Software Developer's Vacation in Penang were personal accounts that dealt more with my life at large.

Five Phases of Programming I Went Through and Whose Fault Is It, Really? were more about my professional life, and some observations I had made over time.

D3 and HighCharts: Pros, Cons and Comparisons was a look at two similar JavaScript libraries. A bit on the dry, geeky side.

The Shits

This section is dedicated to the underperformers. Some of these had an OK amount of views but I expected so much more.

Not hot at all.

My ropework analogies rarely do that well, so I can't really say I'm surprised that The Slip Knot Analogy didn't get much views.

App Review: Duolingo might need more time. But as of now, its viewership is plodding along.

When an absence of value doesn't equate to a NULL was a disappointment. I really thought that a technical post, dry as it might be, would be a welcome entry in a tech blog.

So were Some use cases for JavaScript's Spread Syntax and Branching With Switch Statements for the same reasons outlined above.

The Tree of Newspaper and Toilet Roll Tubes: A TeochewThunder Project was me being vulnerable and all that shit. But oh well, it just didn't get that much traction.

Five Hilariously Unfortunate Names In Tech could have been so much more, but I suppose an international audience can't really appreciate the language-specific humor. Amusingly enough, the name Erlang Shen might have achieved mainstream status after the launch of the game Black Myth: Wukong.

Here's to Ten Years of Blogging!

It's been a decade of blogging. And I'm not done; not by a long shot.

Still trudging along.

There's more content coming up after this blogging break. More tech I'm exploring. More tech trends I'm following up on. More of everything.

And I'm loving every minute. It's a lot of work, but totally worth it.

Till Year Eleven,
T___T

Teochew Thunder: Year Ten (Part 1/2)

Ten big ones. Ten!

This blog has been around for ten years since October in 2014. It feels like a momentous occasion, only it's really not, because I wasn't working up to this being any kind of milestone. In all honesty, I just kind of did my thing, rinse and repeat, and before I knew it, it was the tail end of 2024.

Ten glorious years!

So what's been going on? As I speak, numerous wars rage across the planet, and some of them even involve actual physical violence. Artificial Intelligence is being hyped to the heavens the same way Blockchain and the Metaverse were. The USA is being all dramatic about their upcoming Presidential Election.

In other words, same shit, different day. Business as usual, folks!

This blog has kept moving along even with the numerous changes in my life since it first started in 2014. It hasn't been a huge success but it doesn't need to be. Maintaining it has kept me sharp, sharper than if I'd spent my time playing video games and scrolling on TikTok.

Blogging has been slow this year. From the October of last year, I concentrated on moving house, and finally completed the move on the last day of 2023. Since then, it's been a period of settling in. In addition to that, my Lenovo died and I was scrambling for a replacement.

Web Tutorials

This year, I broke away from my bread-and-butter of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and started making web tutorials in Python. Mostly I just didn't want to neglect the skills I picked up in 2021 and allow them to atrophy too much. So if you regularly check in to see what other cool stuff I have that you can jump into right away without needing to install an environment for it... tough luck I guess.

Been doing a bit more
of Python lately.

Along the way, though, I found time to do something in ReactJS. And the result was last month's web tutorial.

My work has begun incorporating Generative A.I for minor improvements. Nothing earth-shattering. Just trying to develop that muscle memory in the event that one day I'll really need it. And also so that on the occasions I write about A.I, I'll actually have some idea what I'm talking about.

Since I'm on the subject of web tutorials, some readers would have noticed that my Easter web tutorial was posted after Easter this year, as opposed to before. This was a total accident as I lost track. But come to think of it, why can't I do this? There's no good reason, for example, for a Valentine web tutorial to always be before Valentine's Day. Sometimes the occurence of Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year in the same month, makes this a logistical challenge. Thus, from this year forth, I'm giving myself the liberty of posting such web tutorials after the day.

Tech News

As mentioned earlier, A.I has been dominating my newsfeed regularly. The other tech news regular, unfortunately, is big tech layoffs. Just seems to be a thing these days. Thankfully I'm not in big tech. I'm a tech practitioner in the food and beverage industry. Not one of the high-earners to be honest, but I don't have a problem with staying employed. As of last week, I've been at the company four years now.

Getting laid off.

Elon Musk also appears on my feed from time to time for something stupid. It gets less interesting each time, thus I'm saving my limited supply of fucks for something more... fuck-worthy, I guess.

There's been plenty of news related to work or tech (sometimes both!) on the home front. Some were neither, to be fair, even though I managed to relate it to my professional experiences - such as with Singapore's Smoking Samsui Woman Controversy Through a Web Developer's Eyes.

All in all, I think I've gotten better about identifying what qualifies as tech news, or at least tying it in by viewing it through a tech lens.

Other Stuff

My ongoing quest to remove irrelevant tags in this blog is progressing well. In the space of a few months, I've combed through the tags from A to Z. Some of the tags I removed were Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, because clickbaity as they can be, they're not tech personalities and that's what I want to keep this blog about. Arguably I should have started way before now, but ah well, hindsight and all.

I've started included more personal stuff on here. Much of my personal stuff is tied into my identity as a software dev, either directly or indirectly, so that's great. A lot of my life realizations were gleaned from writing software.

I'm chill now. Swear to
fuckin' God.

This has been ongoing for a couple years now, but I'm proud to report that my efforts to decrease the amount of profanity that I use on this blog, is paying off. At least, it has for this year. What's really needed is to sustain the effort for another year, and another, until it becomes second nature. The last thing I want is to come off as this perpetually raging old man.

I've improved on my ability to use A.I to generate images for this blog. It's been a year, and you'll probably see that the images I've generated are far less plastic. I hope. Plus, it's free. Since I'm not making a damn cent off this blog, I think it's fair.

Next

Greatest hits of 2024.