It is that time of the year again. The year rushed by, and now it is time to look back to what I planned to do, what I achieved and what I want to do differently next year.

Blogging

I want to start off talking about my blog. I started my blog a long time ago back in 2008. One year ago, I wrote a detailed article about my 10th anniversary with this blog.

It was November 2018 when I committed to blogging regularly once again, after another break. I only wrote a few articles a year in 2018, and I wanted to change that.

And let me tell you I changed it. I was consistently publishing at least one article per week from November 2018 until July 2019. After that, I took a little break to plan my 5-week trip to the United States. This article is the 33rd and final article for 2019.

The image above shows the number of page views per month, starting from November 2018 and ending in December 2019. At the time of this writing, there are still five days left in 2019, which means that the December numbers will raise a little higher in the end.

What counts for me is that I found my way back to blogging, and I had a lot of fun researching and writing those 33 articles in 2019. Also, it seems like some articles were interesting to the readers as my monthly page views increased from 3500 in November 2018 to around 19’000 in October 2019. I now have more than five times more readers on my blog than a year ago. I am delighted with the results.

Looking forward to 2020, I can only imagine how far this journey will go if I continue to blog about my experiences as a developer regularly. I have a few secret plans for 2020 that I do not want to share yet publicly, but when the time comes, I’ll announce it here first.

Another 5X increase in page views would mean to reach 100’000 page views a month by the end of 2020. I’ll love it for sure if that happens.

You can access the blog archive to find all the articles I wrote in 2019 and also the articles from the years before.

I also started to cross-post my blog articles to dev.to. If you want to make sure you don’t miss out on future articles, consider following me on dev.to.

It is an excellent platform featuring articles from all over the world, which publish articles for developers on various topics.

The goal for 2020 is to continue writing articles, at least 20 of them, and to hopefully break through the 20’000 page views per month barrier. An ambitious goal would be to set 50’000 page views per month as a goal.

YouTube

With the end of 2019, my first year running my developer YouTube channel comes to an end as well. I uploaded 11 videos, and I gained around 600 subscribers and more than 30’000 views.

I wrote several articles about my YouTube journey on this blog. I wrote about 10 Tips for Your Developer YouTube Channel, which could be interesting to read if you plan to start your channel or want to get more traction on your existing channel.

I also wrote a review about my first 365 Days of Building a Software Developer Channel on YouTube. This article goes into detail about my results and what I did in the last year to grow my YouTube channel.

I am satisfied with the results. I wish I were able to create and publish more videos in a year, but more than a video per month on average was not possible. I hope to improve next year. I want to set a goal of 2 videos per month. We’ll see if that happens.

If you haven’t check out my channel, please do so and consider subscribing if you want to follow my journey and learn about software development on the .NET platform.

The goal for 2020 will be to continue creating videos, as stated above. From a metrics perspective, it would be great to reach monetization for the channel by the end of Q1.

Remote Work

2019 is also the first remote work year for me. I am an employer of a local company that has a focus on remote work and enables developers to be as productive as possible by letting them leverage their tools and software that fit them best.

I’m glad for this opportunity, and I am sure that my overall productivity has increased because I can entirely focus on work and do not need to worry about commuting and to lose time when sitting in traffic jam anymore. It helped with the quality of my life a lot. I am very thankful for this opportunity.

At the beginning of 2019, I wrote a detailed article about How Working from Home Really Is. If you consider working remote in the future or if you’re working yourself remotely, this will be interesting to you.

In Autumn of 2019, I recreated my home office by building a custom standing desk. It took me a lot longer than expected, but I am satisfied with the results. When the cable management is finally done correctly, and my desk is cleaned up, I want to share the setup I’m using soon. There will be a video on YouTube, and you’ll also see me blogging about it for sure.

I am not going to change anything about working from home in the next year. I am happy it all worked out, and I’m looking forward to a highly productive 2020.

The United States West Coast Trip

A review of 2019 would not be complete if I would not mention the five weeks I spent on the West Coast of the United States of America. I’ve been in New York twice so far (2014 and 2018), but I’ve never been to the West Coast before.

It worked out to go on a 5-week trip to the West Coast with my girlfriend this year, and it was an incredible experience. I was able to gain so much insight into the lives of other people, and I realized that I am very privileged the way I’m can live my life and how I earn and spend my money.

From big cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas to National Parks, including the Grand Canyon and many other great places, I was able to visit them all.

We drove our rented 2018 Ford Mustang GT about 3800 miles across California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. It was a great experience. I’ll want to to that again, sooner than later.

Twitter

In 2019 I set a big focus on Twitter. I love to connect with other developers on the platform. I read many, many blog articles; I would not have come across if it was not for Twitter.

I also happily share my blog posts on Twitter, and of course, I hope that people notice my contributions and value them high enough to press the share or the like button. In the end, I do it because I love doing it, but it is a motivation boost when I get feedback to something I wrote on my blog or a video I created for YouTube.

I managed to grow my Twitter following from about 300 followers to around 1500 in 2019. I don’t know why so many people decided to follow my journey, but I am pleased about it, and I hope to deliver the content that people are looking forward to.

One tweet went to the roof in 2019. I never had Tweet go viral before, but I believe that it is what happened to the tweet below. It also resulted in about 300-400 people following me. I am glad you joined my journey.

If you are following me on Twitter, drop me a message and say hi. If you’re not, you might want to join my journey sooner than later.

The goal for 2020 will be to continue post engaging content, share my content, and build relationships with other creators in the programming community. It would be great to reach 4000 followers by the end of 2020.

E-Sports Live Events

I could not end the 2019 review without mentioning the two Counter-Strike: Global Offensive events I visited. I went to the ESL One Cologne 2019 event with my Counter-Strike friends, and I went to the StarLadder Berlin Major 2019 with my girlfriend.

Cologne was a spectacular experience. I’ve never been to a live esports event before, and it was a great experience. I have been playing Counter-Strike since 2003, and if I would not be a software developer, I’m convinced I’d want to start a career playing Counter-Strike (streaming, content creation, or whatever).

It took me years to find people who want to attend an event like this with me, and it also took time to find a suitable event. I am thrilled that it worked out to attend two events this year. There is nothing planned for next year, but I’d love to sometime in the future visit another Counter-Strike live event.

Thanks to everyone who made it possible for me to experience joy at those events.

I’m looking forward to a fantastic 2020.

This article was originally published on claudiobernasconi.ch on December 27th, 2019.