I created this blog almost one year ago. It has been quite a ride. I have shared a lot and I have learned a lot also. I’ve published 50 articles, divided in 30 opinion articles, 13 interviews and the rest are references to videos.

During this year I’ve had +20k unique visitors. My top 5 most visited articles are:

  1. From Rails to Clojure, then to Java, then back to Rails
  2. Code patterns that are a recipe for trouble
  3. My framework for one-on-ones
  4. That project where no one wants to work at
  5. Create an onboarding template

The most visited articles are clearly the ones where the links were upvoted on reddit and hackernews, thus reaching more people.

But at the end of the day, I may have tons of visitors, but that ends up being just a vanity metric. I actually get much more value from my shares on Linkedin and Twitter. Over there I get feedback and questions from my network that lead to valuable information exchange.

I learned a lot from the interviews I’ve done. I do want to continue doing them, but it does require an investment on my part and sometimes it’s hard to motivate my interviewees not to keep the interview for ever. Maybe I need to revisit the concept somehow.

My publishing strategy has been the following: one interview on Mondays, one article on Wednesday, and sharing old posts on Friday. Sometimes It’s hard to keep this going, because work and life happens. Sometimes I don’t have anything to write about or I’m not motivated and take some weeks off. But honestly I’m being able to publish more articles than I had anticipated.

Work

This has been a year filled with new challenges. On the beginning of the year I took the challenge of bootstraping a development team from scratch. Usually I’d be on a team and would have to onboard new people. This has its challenges but it’s easier when we already have flows and processes working.

With a new team we have lots of experiences and ways of working and we’re trying to find out what is our identity and the best way to work together. This was very challenging. Even with the concern to hire people that shared the same values, we sometimes struggled to align on processes and how to work.

But if one hand we did have an investment in aligning people, I do believe that the end result was worth it. We had to learn how to compromise, test our beliefs and reach a middle ground. But getting several opinions and different ways to work on the table, allowed us to take the best our of it. We’re still learning to take the best out of it, and we still have a long way to go, but this process has been very interesting.

I was also reminded that goals and deadlines are great for having focus and alignment.

Books

I’ve read 15 books this year. I’d say that this is my preferred way of learning new things. There were a couple of books that really resonated with me and changed my day to day behaviour.

I do think that it’s not enough. For the net year I’ll aim to read 20 books. This will enforce me to change my habits, so lets see how that works out.

Summary

I really like to write for the blog. It forces me to structure my thoughts and allows for great feedback. Without a doubt this is accomplishing my goals with the blog: learning new things, sharing my ideas and train my written communication.

So here are some goals for 2019:

  • Publish 50 opinion articles
  • Publish 10 interviews
  • Try to get some guest posts?
  • Review the newsletter format