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