TeochewThunder: Year Five (Part 2/2)

It was a dismal year for readership, to tell the truth. I suspect this was in part largely due to the shutting down of Google Plus, which contributed maybe 10% of my usual hits. While the year started out reasonably well, readership went down after Chinese New Year, and hasn't picked up appreciably since.

Getting kinda lonely here, guys.

Luckily I'm not doing this for the attention, because that would suck.

Strangely, I think the quality of my work has gone up; though without readership stats to back up that assertion, it's an empty boast at best.

There were some things I could have written about. The year sure wasn't short on tech news. I could have written about Cloudflare and their decision to abandon 8Chan, the same way I wrote about a similar decision taken by their CEO Matthew Prince back in 2017. I even started ruminating over the new Code of Conduct at Linux and sabbatical of Linus Torvalds, before abandoning that train of thought altogether. The thing is, I'm sick to death of the USA and the never-ending online presence of their identity politics. Conservatives? Liberals? Fuck all of them. They should sort their shit out and I'm certainly not giving them any more air-time than I need to. My little pieces on Patreon and Twitter earlier this year was as far as I cared to go.

Sure, writing about stuff like that attracts the attention of even non-techies. But I shouldn't lose sight of what this blog is for.

The biggest hit of 2019...

One blogpost stood out among all the others when I did some investigation - the two-parter Women Can Code, Get Used To It! This had the second biggest number of hits in the entire history of TeochewThunder, almost matching the current record-holder, 2018's Ten Principles of Adult Learning Applied to Software Development. I suspect a huge part of its popularity was because I shared this with several female friends, not all of whom are from technical disciplines, and they pretty much did the rest by re-sharing.

Gorgeous geek girls?

Interestingly, the second part of Women Can Code, Get Used To It! was far more popular than the first. I guess people were more interested in my declaration that tech is not a gender-specific profession, rather than what I felt was more interesting - examples of pretty ladies that don't conform to the geek girl stereotype.

On further review

It appears that a web tutorial from 2017 has suddenly gotten a lot of attention - way more attention than I think it deserves. It was basically a BMI Calculator written in AngularJS, and the first ever AngularJS tutorial on this blog. Again, yes, don't look a gift horse in the mouth... but damn if it isn't suspicious.

Future Plans

The road map for this blog features a lot more reviews that I never had time to write - books, apps and my ongoing writeups about the TV series Silicon Valley, which, sadly, looks about to end its run soon.

I'm also trying to keep to the basics, because I've always been all about the basics. There's a lot to cover. Fun or boring, they all have a place on this blog. 2020 looks promising. There's so much to write about, and the list looks to be growing all the time.

Thunderously,
T___T

TeochewThunder: Year Five (Part 1/2)

This October marks the fifth year since TeochewThunder was started, and what a journey it has been so far. There's been plenty to write about, and I'm not running out of material anytime soon. Although there have been times I just didn't feel like writing. Blogging is an exercise in discipline. It forces me to keep exploring; keep my eyes, ears and mind open for more related topics, and most importantly, it keeps me honing my craft. It's a veritable ocean out there and I'm a shark; if I ever stop, that's it for me.

Can't stop!

Still, compared to hectic madness that was 2018, this year was a breeze. Being married and all, I can't devote as much time to this enterprise as I'm used to, but sometimes it's all about time management.

It also gives me a sense of purpose. Because work can drive me nuts... and when I get home, I need something to remind myself that I still love this shit. Something fun. Something productive.

Tutorials

2019 is the year I return to my roots - instantly browser-executable HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but with additional front-end niceties like jQuery UI, AngularJS and ReactJS thrown in. My style of coding has changed slightly. I'm now particular about spacing and indentation (fine, more particular than before) and when I do get the chance, my preferred style skews towards Object-oriented Programming. Happily, I still find time to do a little PHP, Ruby and QBasic.

Nothing really significant has changed otherwise; I'm still the nerd who codes outside of office hours and derives more pleasure than is reasonable from it. This results in at least one web tutorial a month, and I plan to maintain that standard.

Reviews

There have been a lot of reviews in TeochewThunder this year. Almost every month, there's been a review of some sort or other, and happily, they have been somewhat evenly spread out between film, app and fiction reviews. Reviews are easy to write, usually, and I've discovered a newfound enthusiasm for it. Also, many of these are backdated. While I collect the screenshots and all, I don't always have time to write all these reviews.

This blog is about more than tech reviews! And I have to be careful not to turn this into a review blog.

Miscellaneous Features

Spot The Bug. I manage about three of these a year, and to this day, I have not broken that streak.

Ropework analogies. One a year seems reasonable. Again, I've managed to keep that up, though this year's seemed a little trite. No matter, all part of the journey.

Listicles. These are fun to make; however they're also a lot of work. They used to be a good way to group related ideas into one blogpost so I wouldn't have to overlap too much when discussing similar ideas next time.

Work on teochewthunder dot com

Things have gotten a wee bit more expensive since 2018, what with me paying for hosting. Still, considering the benefits that this resource brings me, it's a small price to pay.

I get a domain name and a portfolio for prospective employers. It isn't great, but it's a heck of a lot better than nothing, which incidentally is what many developers have other than a resume and a lot of bravado. I don't really understand why other web devs don't invest in a domain name and hosting, especially when they're technically more skilled than I am and have a lot more to showcase. But it works in my favor and you know what they say about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

And it has worked. I attended interviews this year and the interviewers all mentioned the amount of code I've put online, along with my tech blogging. Sure, they don't always say it's good, but still. It's a body of work that has spanned years and it's being noticed by the audience for which it was intended.

All in all...

I sometimes struggle with not writing too much, especially when I have points that I want to make. But part of effective writing is restraint, and it's something that many people, not just me, could use more of.

Cutting away all that fat.

Every overly wordy Social Media post or article I come across annoys the living beejeezus out of me and I try very hard not to fall into that trap. These days, more time is spent trimming the fat than actually writing.

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