2015 on radek.io

The start of a new year is a milestone that makes many of us stop and look forward. What 2016 has in store for us? The next 12 months give us an opportunity to grow and empty page to fill.

When planning ahead, we need to look back and reflect. What worked well and what didn’t? It’d foolish to repeat the same mistakes. This post looks at how things went for this blog in 2015.

Some numbers

Over the past 12 months, I posted 28 new articles. Four went out in the first half of 2015, and 24 in the second. The website amassed 127,848 hits, 109,572 of which came in the second part of the year, after I started publishing every week.

I wrote 28,262 words in total, about the same number of words that make up George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The average post was then 1009.35 words long.

I wrote a post every weekend in the second half of 2015 except of one. The struggle to get the next post out was real sometimes, but that’s a part of it, isn’t it?

The popular ones

I got a few really good hits this year. The most popular saw as much visits as the whole website over the whole previous year. Here’s the TOP 3 for 2015:

1. httpie: A CLI http client that will make you smile (32,416)
2. Printing images in the terminal with 9 lines of Ruby (11,533)
3. Bringing the best of Bash scripting to Ruby (7,514)

These three and various other posts were featured in the Hacker Newsletter, Ruby and Node Weekly and Ruby5 podcast. The post about httpie made it to the front page of Hacker News for a bit.

To my sincere astonishment, The Next Web featured my catpix gem on its front page:

Considering that the former got three times the number of hits, making it on Hacker News seems to work better than being picked up by real press.

A honourable mention goes to

• Private, protected and public in Python (11,826)
• Static variables and methods in Python (8,079)
• The Magical container_of() Macro (5,059).

These three articles remain amongst the most visited posts on the site.

The mistakes

Every post I put out with the same level of enthusiasm for the topic and hope that people will find it useful. Each one of them takes roughly the same effort to write and edit. And few of them fall completely flat. Here are the TOP 3 disasters of 2015:

1. docopt: A brief introduction (23)
2. My notes from LNUG November 2015 (60)
3. Should innovation be driven by experiments or experience? (102)

Docopt went out after a long period of inactivity, so that isn’t that surprising. LNUG is only relevant to a few hundred people in London. But I genuinely thought the third one would be interesting. Well, that’s awkward.

Happy New Year

Thank you for reading my posts and supporting what I do. You guys make it fun!

In 2016, I hope to bring you as much useful content about programming and open source as I possibly can. If you have anything that you’d like me to write about, shoot me an email or tweet at @radekpazdera.

Have an awesome 2016!