First Year of Blogging

First Year of Blogging

At the beginning of 2023, I decided to start this blog and see where it goes. Time to look back and share some insights and thoughts about the last year as well as look forward to what's coming next.


Motivation

I've always had in mind to start a blog, but never really made the time. Then I attended a tech conference and listened to the talks presented and felt inspired to finally get going. There was also a Tweet from Vlad Mihalcea directly calling me out for never making time and so I started. I looked up the speakers and I noticed that most of them had some sort of online presence where they share their content. I've also frequented and got a lot of help from more specialised blogs during my work as a Software Engineer and so I set out to write stuff that will hopefully help others as well.

Apart from that, there are of course a lot of other upsides to blogging as well:

  • It's a great way to learn new things and dive deeper into topics
  • As a non native English speaker, it's a great way to improve my English
  • It's a great way to document my own learnings and experiences for the future
  • It's a great way to create exposure and get new opportunities

Looking back

I guess at the beginning I went through all the typical mistakes. Being a software engineer I wanted to roll out my own blog and deploy and develop it myself. So I've lost a bunch of time trying to come up with the optimal solution on where to deploy my blog, which programming language to use, instead of writing actual content. So I've reluctantly set up my Wordpress subscription and after a short while, my blog was online and I was ready to write. During that year however, I was frustrated a lot by Wordpress. But more on that later.

In the first few months, coming up with ideas was pretty easy. There was a new Java Release and Virtual Threads where on the Java Horizon with Project Loom. In my own time I was reading a book about cryptography and decided to play around with Google Tink for a bit. All worthwhile topics to write about. After that I was searching around for an interesting topic to write about and found the Testcontainers Library in a Techradar. I was eager to try it out at work and after growing to love it, I choose to write some posts about it as well.

As it turns out, those two posts were probably the most influential posts of the year, not necessarily because of the traffic they generated, but because of the opportunities they provided. Shortly after I wrote those posts I was asked if I could hold a tech talk at work and it was really easy to present the topic because I already had most of the material and was pretty confident in explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the library. I also pitched the presentation to the Java User Group in Switzerland and they accepted the talk. When I showed up there I expected maybe ten or fifteen people but was surprised that the room was fully packed with around 50 people. So that was nice and showed me how creating exposure can lead to opportunities.

After that, I struggled to find interesting topics to write about, luckily for me there was a new Java version coming out with a lot of changes and I prepared and published an article on the release day. This showed me two things: Timing matters, and Social Media can have a huge impact on your traffic. Shortly after I posted my article, it was reposted on X by a Java DevRel and was instantly the most viewed article on my page. To be fair, that doesn't take much yet ;) but it was still pretty cool to watch the numbers grow.

After knowing that blogging about tech related topics was fun for me, I decided to invest some time to finally roll out my own blog since I was pretty frustrated with my workflow. I'm used to write in an IDEA with Markdown files, and formatting code blocks and blog posts in an online editor just wasted a lot of my time. So over the holidays I took some time to deploy a fresh blog with vercel using next.js and contentlayer.

Statistics & Social Media

Over the last Year, I wrote 9 articles and 212 Visitors generated 295 Views. It's not much, but it's honest work ;)

Stats

Most popular Posts:

  • Project Loom - A guide to Virtual Threads
  • The 5 most exciting features of Java 21

Personal favorite:

  • Project Loom - A guide to Virtual Threads
  • Integration Testing Made Easy

I've also started using X more to share my content, even tough I'm not the biggest social media fan and I always feel a bit reluctant using it. Which also reflects in my follower numbers, but hey, I made the double digits and have 10 followers now - and only 5 or 6 of them are bots! So yeah, definitely some room for improvement there.

Talks

As already mentioned above I've leveraged my Testcontainer series to present the topic to the Java User Group in Zurich. I've also send this talk to a couple conferences and hope to hear back soon.

Conclusion & Goals for 2024

All in all, I'm pretty happy with the last year. When I started I didn't expect any traffic for the first year, so it's pretty cool to see over 200 different visitors. For the next year I want to increase my output to at least one article per month and increase my social media presence to reach more people. I will continue to mainly write about Java, Spring and Kotlin but will also try to branch out a bit and maybe create some online courses as well.

So stay tuned for more articles in 2024 and thanks for reading!