TeochewThunder: Year Eight (Part 2/2)

For this blogging year, the usual features were there - reviews, web tutorials, listicles and so on. I'm glad to report that the popular posts didn't all fall into one category or other. At the very least, it indicates that readers appreciate a variety of blogpost types. Well, except for web tutorials. The readership for those were consistently low.

Viewership for blogposts usually peak at the two-week mark, so they will be judged based on that. The statistics are from LinkedIn and Google.

Top Picks

These are the blogposts that were the cream of the crop. They hit high viewership numbers. Half of them were about current affairs. The rest were made up of a listicle, a review and a dry technical piece.

Crowd-pleasers!

ONE Pass to rule them all was one of my most recent blogposts. I used no profanities in there, but damn, the shade I threw would make an umbrella blush.

The old-fashioned way to skirt the OCBC Phishing Scam was written as a thought piece on something that happened in Singapore last xxx. No surprises there; this was a hot topic on our little island.

Reference Review: The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers; now, this one was a surprise. My reviews generally haven't had all that much success. Add to the fact that I wasn't excessively complimentary towards Uncle Bob...

Ten Lessons From The Art Of War Applied To Software Development, a fun listicle I put together after attending some rooms on the Clubhouse app.

Discrete And Continuous Data Defined is a headscratcher. This was a dry a piece as I've ever done and honestly I'm not at all sure why it got so popular.

Elon Musk and the Twitter Takeover was an expected hit; after all, it was the topic for a while there regardless of whether or not you were a techie.

Excellent Response

This group encompasses blogposts that got a decent amount of readership, though not enough to propel them to the next tier.

Cleared that bar.

Using Trello outside of the professional workplace was a little geek-out piece of how I used this software in my everyday life.

Software Review: Power BI had a decent enough amount of clicks, which was probably better than I hoped for.

Google moves to 2FA! underperformed, really. Maybe it just wasn't that interesting.

Five Software Development Takeaways From the COP Saga in 2021 was a piece about Singapore politics, though I tied it into tech practices.

Film Review: Black Mirror Series One astonished me because I didn't think people would be interested in a series that premiered so long ago.

Trail of the Catfish was something I wrote about an experience I witnessed and was only peripherally involved in. It had a fair bit of traction on Facebook (because people who use Facebook love that shit) but not so much on LinkedIn.

OK-ish

These posts got a bit of attention, but statistically they got the short end of the stick. Most of them were dry technical blogposts, so no surprise there.

Good reads.

Tech Wizardry in the Beijing Winter Olympics and Ten Pieces Of African Wisdom In Software Development were pieces I felt deserved more views, but it is what it is.

Functional Terminology, The Different Categories of Data Analytics, Mean, Median and Mode in Python, Thoughts About HTML5, Different Number Types in Datasets and Code indentation reduction using Guard Clauses were wholly technical, nothing exciting here.

Reading Books In Modern Technology was something whimsical I did. Probably could have written it better.

App Review: Bazooka Boy was a mediocre review about a mediocre app. Probably got the views it deserved.

Special Mentions

These were blogposts that were especially poignant in the year 2022. They might not have obtained all that much traction, but I'm going to mention them here because they were personally important to me.

Spotlight!

How I became a Married Software Developer chronicles the arduous years leading up to my marriage, and is closely tied to my career as a software developer.

Ten Cheap Shots At Internet Explorer is a glorious, glorious day for me and I refuse to let the lack of views dampen it.

That's all for now!

It has been a pretty decent year, considering this is the eighth straight year I'm doing this. It's not been an outstanding year by any means, but I like to think I at least met a certain standard. If you're reading this, kudos for your continued support!

Thanks for your kind 8-tention!
T___T

TeochewThunder: Year Eight (Part 1/2)

2022 so far has had me working from home, just like 2021. The main difference that my wife has been back from China since the last quarter of the previous year. And my efforts to acclimatize to the inevitable changes in my lifestyle could fill an entire book, never mind a blogpost.

Suffice to say, my blogging and coding time has met a few roadblocks, because there are times my duties as a husband take precedence. As they should. I'm happy to say, however, that I've managed to stay pretty constant, even though the average length of my blogposts has significantly decreased. Part of that could also be due to a conscious effort towards brevity. Honestly, I take no pleasure in droning on like some pompous, oblivious jackass.

No more commute!

This is the third year in a row I spent the majority of my time working from home. This gave me greater freedom to blog, or at least research new ideas. At least, the time I saved on commuting definitely contributed.

As soon as the workday is done, I can go right to coding, or blogging, instead of waiting to get home, and probably getting physically drained from the commute. It can't be overstated how much this has improved my work on the blog.

Trello

If anything good came from the utter shitshow that was my job at this company, it was that I took careful note of all the tools they used, and adopted those practices as much as I could. One of these tools was Trello. It's no exaggeration to say that it practically runs my life now.

I have written a blogpost about how I use Trello outside of the workplace. It helps greatly in keeping consistent, which is a giant step in trying to achieve any kind of success, no matter how small. Perhaps I'll elaborate on this sometime later in the year.

My blogging and coding tasks are now scheduled via Trello. I'm having a blast, though a one-man experience for Trello probably is not conducive to training for a real team environment. Still, it's something.

Audio Social Media

A large part of last year and the entirety of this year was spent weaning myself off of Facebook and using the app known as Clubhouse. And to a lesser extent, LinkedIn. If I'm to be perfectly honest, my distancing from Facebook began more than a few years back, and my introduction to Clubhouse pretty much accelerated the process.

On Clubhouse, I've found myself moving in several circles - American, African, Japanese, Chinese and Malaysian - and the subsequent conversations I've had, have spawned a multitude of ideas. These ideas sometimes translate into blogposts (see Ten Lessons From The Art Of War Applied To Software Development and Ten Pieces Of African Wisdom In Software Development) or code projects (notably The Japanese Language Trainer App). Upon the relaxation of border controls, I've even had friends from Clubhouse come to Singapore to meet up offline.

All in all, my time on Clubhouse has been pretty fruitful, despite it often looking otherwise.

LinkedIn

As mentioned previously, there has been a conscious move from Facebook to LinkedIn. A large part of this reason is audience.

While I used to share completed blogposts on Facebook, at some point I began to realize that I was preaching to the wrong crowd. Facebook users pretty much just want to watch funny cat videos and share memes. The content of my blogposts can sometimes be very technical, and consequently pretty dry. I've found that sharing my blogposts on LinkedIn, where the majority of my connections are professional rather than personal, have gained greater traction.

Now, when I have blogposts that add value to my professional profile, I share them on LinkedIn. My rather more spicy rants about employers have been confined to Facebook, where they gain plenty of traction on their own.

Next

Let's take a look at how popular some of this year's blogposts were.