2022 was the first year of this blog. As the year is ending, I would like to reflect on how the blog is going and some of my decisions before starting it.

Personal goals

I started the blog with three main objectives:

• Get deeper into some topics I like: I think writing things down leads to better learning.
• Help other people with the content.
• Improve my communication skills.

Additionally, I planned to write one article per month to maintain some regularity.

After this year, I think those goals are still relevant for me so I'll keep those objectives for the next one. Although I'm measuring some things like post visits, shared posts, or outbound links, I don't have any clear goal for that right now.

Some decisions in review

I had some doubts about several topics before starting the blog.

Language

As you can see, this blog is entirely written in English. Despite the risk of lowering the blog's quality because of using a non-native language (I'm Spanish), I feel that using Spanish would have reduced the target audience.

After this year, I think it was a good decision.

• Only 39% of the blog visitors were from Spain. The next countries on the list are the United States (12%), Germany (6%), and the United Kingdom (6%).

It's impossible to know if the content in Spanish would have attracted more visitors here, but I'm glad to reach people from around the world. Also, it's helping me to improve my English written skills.

Own a domain name or use content platforms

Initially, I had some doubts about maintaining my own site or publishing the content on some platforms like Medium or dev.to. As I explained in the first post, it was important for me to own the content so I decided to maintain my own site.

Until now, I'm also happy with the results. The advantage of owning the content is there, and I didn't spend much time on maintenance tasks for the site.

Analytics

As I said before, even though it was not my main goal, I wanted to have an idea of how many people were reading the posts and get feedback about it. When I had to choose an analytics platform, I only knew Google Analytics and I was a bit overwhelmed. There were so many things that I didn't need or understand.

After some research, I found Plausible and I liked it. It's an open-source project and it provides simple analytics. Apart from that, I liked the fact that they don't use cookies.

Most relevant content

These were the most-read posts of this first year:

• Cross-team communication: avoid dependencies: a review of how cross-team communication scales and how it affects the delivery lead time.

• From Software Engineer to Product Engineer: Apart from implementing solutions, product engineers want to understand why problems deserve to be solved, how people use the product, and participate in the decision-making.

• Iterative and Incremental Development: we need both: iterative and incremental are different ideas with different purposes. This article shows the differences between these concepts and how we usually apply them.

Conclusion

Overall, it was a good first year for this blog. I think I'm fulfilling my initial goals and I'm really happy with the results, as I also received really good feedback about some posts.

Let's see if I'm able to keep a good regularity in 2023.

Thank you for reading this.