The year 2022 was partially eclipsed by COVID-19 for me. I have achieved some of my goals for the year. This will be the fourth recap of the year I am writing, the first one was written in 2019, and the last one in 2021. In this post, I am going to write about some of the professional and technical things I have done this year, let’s get going!
Table of contents #
- Highlights
- Interview for a podcast
- Blogging and Writing in 2022
- Talks and events
- Side Project - Bloggers’ Union
- Mini demo projects
- Misc
- Conclusion
Highlights #
Here are some of the highlights of 2022 from a professional and tech viewpoint:
- I did an interview for Tech Talk with Madhab in Aug-2022
- Published 25+1 (this recap) post on this blog. Compared to 2021 this blog had 2x higher page views. In terms of users, this blog got 2.1x more users than in 2021, the answer is SEO again.
- This blog got a new theme towards the end of Jun-2022. More about the blog and its traffic, etc later.
- My blog posts made it to other publications too like Meticulous, LogRocket blog, FlagSmith, and one in App Signal blog too.
- This year the main side project was Bloggers’ union and I whipped up 3-4 mini demo projects for various blog posts. One of them is the Name to nationality guessing app in React.
- I did two virtual talks and a couple of in person talks. One of the in-person events was more of a panel discussion and another one was a talk about Serverless Containers at Google Sydney. I attended an in-person conference too, which felt pretty different.
- There are 6 newish Software Engineering Bloggers that have popped up in the past 5 months from a side project we are working on called Bloggers’ Union.
I got a new job as a Senior Software Engineer at SimplyWallSt. After working in fashion e-commerce for 10 years across 2 continents it was a refreshing change. Another good thing was coming out of a 1000+ people company to a 60+ person start-up/scale-up with no bureaucracy and red tape. In the next section…
Interview for a podcast #
In Aug-2022 I was interviewed by Madhab Dhakal for his podcast Tech Talk with Madhab. I was approached by Madhab and we discussed things related to Tech, career, and focused more on getting a Job in tech and some suggestions for recent tech graduates.
The interview was an easygoing one.
It was good to share my experiences and what I know about tech, the Australian tech scene, and software engineering in general.
Below is the video of the interview:
Next up, we will discuss this blog, the new theme and how did the writing go for me this year.
Blogging and Writing in 2022 #
I started this blog in 2007, so that makes this blog 16 years old now. In terms of internet years that is a bit more than eternity. Writing consistently is not easy for anyone, me included.
Thankfully, I have written 25 blog posts this year and this recap of 2022 makes it 26. ;)
This year I wrote on some new topics too like TypeScript, React, Jest and Axios. Below is the breakdown of posts by each month
Breakdown by each month #
In Jul, I wrote 6 posts and in Feb, Mar, Apr, and May I wrote only 1 post each in those two months, here is the breakdown:
- Jan - 2
- Feb - 1
- Mar - 1
- Apr - 1
- May - 1
- Jun - 2
- Jul - 6
- Aug - 3
- Sep - 2
- Oct - 2
- Nov - 2
- Dec - 2 (not counting this review of the year post)
By the end of Jun, I had only 8 posts written for this blog in 2022 in the latter half I added the remaining 17 posts making it a total of 25 posts for this year. Hopefully next year it would be a bit more consistent but the goal was to get 24 posts with an average of 2 posts a month. So in the end I exceeded the goal by 1 post thanks to 6 posts in Jul and 3 in Aug.
Among the posts written in 2022, there were some that were popular and some that were not so popular. Next, you will know about the top 5 popular ones.
Most viewed blog posts of 2022 #
The most viewed blog posts written and published in 2022 for this blog are:
- Using Redis with docker and docker-compose for local development a step-by-step tutorial - Jan 2022
- How to use MySQL with Docker and Docker compose a beginners guide - Feb 2022
- 3 efficient ways to generate UUID in Node.js - Jan-2022
- Two useful ways to easily run a single test using Jest - Jul-2022
- Using Jest beforeEach to write better unit tests in JavaScript, with code example - Jun-2022
Looks like the posts about Jest were pretty popular this year, maybe a topic to consider for 2023 too.
Blog traffic going up #
Even this year the main source of traffic has been from search engines specifically Google due to the efforts I have put into SEO.
In 2022, this blog’s traffic has increased by 211.24% compared to 2021. SEO traffic is up by 240% for the same period.
Below is a quick comparison of how people land on this blog for 2021 and 2022.
If I compare the traffic of 2020 vs 2022 there is a 1000% percent increase, all thanks to the ruthless focus on SEO. That is the reason that this blog is now one of the top 350K websites in the world.
I don’t want to reveal exact numbers but it is safe to say the blog had more than a million page views by more than half a million visitors in 2022 which is not a small number by any measure. With just 25 posts a year this is the ceiling I guess but I will like to be proved wrong again.
I do not push ads in the main content and also don’t nag people to subscribe to the newsletter.
This blog is there to provide value and information while being super easy to read. There are no ads in between content and there will be none in the foreseeable future too. Enjoy reading valuable technical, software engineering, and programming-related content free and virtually ad-free.
In terms of ranking, compared with the Raking from SimilarWeb this blog has come from being in the 515,013rd position in Dec 2021 to the 358,133rd position in Dec 2022.
So it has come up by 156880 places in the last 12 months. You can see the screenshot from Similarweb from 2021 and the current one below:
Other publications #
In addition to writing for my own blog, I write for other publications too. All of these blog posts are original work and they are not cross-posted to other places even my own blog. These pieces are paid for by the publication. I have written some posts for the Meticulos blog this year and a couple of posts for FlagSmith blog too. I have also written one blog post for the App Signal blog this year about Async Code in JavaScript.
In the next section, I will highlight the talks given and events I attended in 2022.
Talks and events #
I gave a couple of talks this year and also attended some events, the highlights are below:
Serverless Containers at Google Sydney #
I gave a talk at Google's Sydney office on 16-Nov-2022. It was for the GDG meetup and the topic was Serverless containers. Below is a photo from that event:
And the slides that I presented are on Google Slides.
Career progression talk #
I gave a talk via zoom in late July 2022 titled Habits to get you promoted as a software engineer for the tech team at Globaly. I think it was received very well. I discussed some useful habits that will help a software engineer get promoted.
The slides of the talk are below:
Work Visa and PR for the techies panel discussion #
I was part of another tech panel discussion about a topic that interests me, work visas and Permanent residence for Software engineers in Australia. The event was organized by Dented Code and it also had other panelists. One of them was Ujjwal Ojhan another software engineer and there was a migration lawyer too. Below is an image from that event which took place in Jun-2022:
Attended Cloud Connect Sydney by Cloudflare #
Cloudflare’s connect conference in Sydney was another interesting event I attended in person on 8-Sep-2022. It was an exciting event not only for the content but for the fact that it was the first in-person event I attended after 2019. The content was pretty expected for a company-specific conference but meeting other people was the fun part of it. Below is an image from the event:
I also attended a couple of meetups this year which was a great way to reconnect and network. Next we will discuss about a side project.
Side Project - Bloggers’ Union #
I had an idea in August for a side project and/or a project to help other software engineers get more into blogging. As mentioned above in the past 3 years, the traffic for this blog has increased 10x (yes 1000%) with a ruthless focus on SEO.
I wanted some engineers I know to start a blog or revive their own blog with their own domain and start writing some technical posts. I would be there to help and guide. There is a buddy model where two people check and balance each other’s posts. Below are some of the posts published after starting this side project:
- How to build rock, paper and scissors in React, a beginners guide - By Anubhab Karki
- How to use Cors with Nest Js - By Bipin Prajuli
- How to use React Image Gallery to build a beautiful and responsive image gallery - By Ajeet Chaulagain
- What is isObject in javascript? - By Saroj Maharjan
- How to Convert a String into Title Case with JavaScript and Regex- By Suvash Budathoki
- Isset Equivalent in Javascript - By Manish Maharjan
I have a slide deck and a couple of videos describing the steps for an SEO-optimized blog post. If you are interested send me an email and I can send you the content. There are a couple of posts that should have been published but I think it will be live by mid to end of Jan. 6 new software engineering bloggers popping up in the last 5 months is not bad at all :). The guys are doing great spread across 3 countries, keep up the good work.
Mini demo projects #
For some of the blog posts, I have written for this blog as well as other publications I have whipped up a few mini projects. Some of the noticeable ones are as follows
Name nationalities guesser #
This is a simple React.js app hosted on Netlify. It guesses the Nationalities for a given name by using the Nationalize.io API. The app’s code is available on GitHub and it looks like the below:
GeoWeather #
Another app I wrote for a different blog post guesses the user’s city and fetches the weather information of that city. To fetch the geolocation data it uses the Cloudflare pages/worker that provides this data as a request header. Next, it calls the weather API from APINinjas to get the weather data and show it. This app is hosted on CloudFlare pages and the code is open source on GitHub. The app looks as follows, will change as per your city or guessed city nearby as per Cloudflare:
There are some other mini projects too, like searching within the last 20 hacker news posts with React for the React Search Bar post. You can find its code in this open-source repository. And another one using Axios Interceptors, you can find the code on GitHub. You can find all the example repos and mini projects on my GitHub profile.
Misc #
There are other misc things I have done this year from a professional point of view, some of them are:
- I completed Hacktoberfest this year too, waiting for the t-shirt.
- Had virtual chat with other techies mainly from Nepal or who are in Nepal to know more about the tech landscape in Kathmandu and Nepal.
- This year I helped 2-3 more people find their first full-time tech job in Australia, continuing the AU Tech Jobs fever.
- I am off social media for more than 2 years now, so I don’t know what mastodon is.
That looks like a wrap of this pretty eventful year for me.
Conclusion #
This year was different for me, from a new job to attending in-person events after 3 years. I hope to be active in the community in 2023 too or at least write the usual blog posts. See you in 2023, happy new year.