2019 Year in Review

#yearinreview #softwareengineering #publicspeaking #blogging

This is the first time I am writing a recap of a year after getting inspired by some amazing recaps. This post is a look back on all the professional things I did this year and a hint to what’s coming in 2020. Last year I did 5 most popular posts on my blog, this year is a look back at 2019. Let’s jump to the highlights.

Highlights

I was featured in a podcast as a software engineer and blogger
My public speaking efforts were recognized by CFP land in an interview
This year I spoke at 4 tech conferences and 4 meetups with 4 talks, magic no 4.
I successfully migrated my pet project Nepal News English to Google Cloud run written in Node Js
Wrote 12 blog posts this year, 1 per month is not a bad average :)

Featured

I was featured in a podcast on devpath.fm and my interview as an “Intercontinental Speaker” was published on CFPLand. I am pretty sure this is not going to happen in 2020 so let me enjoy the little fame I earned in 2019 :).

Public Speaking

This year I did more than 10 talks, 8 of them were public and 2+ were internal at THE ICONIC. Among the many CFPs I submitted for tech conference the following 4 were accepted and I spoke at these conferences:

I spoke about the importance of automated testing, Microservices, Serverless Containers and Logging Best Practices this year.

I did a talk each quarter of the year in 2019. You can find a full timeline of all my public speaking in this Github repo. In terms of impact, just in 2019, I have spoken in front of ~1100 people without traveling to another city.

Blogging

In 2019, until now, I have written 12 blog posts. The year started with a technical topic of debugging NodeJs applications and my last post at the start of December was about getting your Pull Request (PR) merged faster. Below are the top 5 viewed posts of 2019 written in the same year:

Almost all of my blog posts are cross-posted to dev.to and hackernoon. On medium. I generally post to ITNext publication and this year one of my posts made it to FreeCodeCamp News.

I have written some posts for THE ICONIC tech blog too, one of them about tailing logs from Kubernetes pod was the most popular post for that publication.
I don’t want to give out the exact numbers. Still, from the view counts of my blog’s google analytics, medium, and dev.to stats, it was over 200K views. I think I am helping the software engineer’s community quite well with my writing :).

Ok, it just happened once that I had 80 people on this blog at the same time but worth a mention :).

Side Project

Notice that it is a side project, not multiple side projects :). I will mention the one I successfully migrated to Node js codebase and it is running on Google Cloud Run. The project in Nepal News English. It was stated to scratch my own itch :). I have not lived in Nepal for almost 10 years now and I want to read Nepal’s news in one place. That’s how it was born. It started with mashing up some free online services but in 5 years they became ultra restrictive.

I took this opportunity to write a small app that parses RSS and scrapes some news sites that don’t have RSS (pity a news website without RSS). Then it uses a database to know unposted news and the one’s not posted are tweeted every X minutes. I completed this in like 2-3 weekends. The twitter bot/user has 11K followers now which is pretty good in my understanding. The code is not open source.

Misc

Some of the other things I am happy I did this year.

Mentoring/helping find a tech job

I have helped at least 5 people find tech jobs here in Sydney. Most of them were Masters' students here trying to break into the tech scene but not finding it easy. Blog posts about landing your first tech job and things recruiters look in your resume was an effort to help people in similar situations. Another thing I did was to help along the same line was to create an open-source repo that lists tech(ish) AU companies providing work visa sponsorship. This has helped people in Australia as well as abroad.

Open-source

I have not contributed much to open source this year but I did complete the Hacktoberfest in the first week. The good thing about this year is I got the swag delivered :)

A quick peek on my Github stats showed 1997 commits this year, which is good IMHO. Of course, most of it was for closed source projects.

Love is in the code #couplecodes

I did a series of tweets/LinkedIn posts with the imaginary conversations of couples who code in Jan-Feb 2019. It was not very popular but I think it is worth a mention here. Disclaimer: My wife does not code and this is dedicated to like 3+ couples I know where both code or used to write software. Enjoy the conversation as a twitter moment.

More twitter followers

I think I have gained close to 500 followers in 2019, which is not bad. I am looking for more twitter followers so if you are not following me on twitter please do so :) Below is my most popular tweet of 2019:

I posted lots of interesting reads on LinkedIn too.

Looking ahead to 2020

I have set some goals for 2020, one of them should be met in Jan 2020 I think. You will know about it as it happens. I plan to do some public speaking in 2020 too, I have not set any targets though. I will continue to blog the frequency may vary but there will be some posts.