year review

2024 Year Review

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A very different year when compared to 2023 (where I spent most of the year on a boat).

I’m back working full-time, and primarily in a closed source space (currently) at Lightbug. I’m primarily cloud focused, but have been moving closer and closer to the firmware and hardware month by month. I’m looking forward to releasing some new things this year, including something with an ESP on board!

It’s been the first year that I have stepped back from Wikimedia since starting as a volunteer, and then also working there full-time, and that has been a refreshing break.

Within the Wikimedia world, my primarily volunteer focuses have been and will continue to be:

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2023 Year Review

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What a year, I spent most of my time on a sail boat, cruising around the Caribbean etc, and working part-time for Wikimedia on Wikibase.

WBStack became Wikibase.Cloud and the team now working behind it has continued to iterate on the platform, which finally made its way out of its early alpha state. That also came with a snazzy new landing page, and set of logos for Wikibase etc.

Infact, in the last few weeks I finally saw all of the old wbstack Github issues finally migrate onto Phabricator for the team to more easily view and work with.

I look forward to creating an overview of the things that have changed with Wikibase.Cloud year on year at some point, as an overview of the progression of the platform that I still believe is very important to the continued growth of Wikibase.

In the less digital world, I turned our many boaty blog posts and pictures into a book! No you can’t buy one (maybe if we made a 2nd edition. But can we consider ourselves published authors now? It has an ISBN on the back, after all?

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2022 Year Review

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This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Year Reviews

I’ve been doing year reviews since 2017 under the #year-review tag, and 2022 is no different. Expect I have been living aboard a sailboat traveling the world for the latter half of the year. So this year is probably going to look a little different in retrospect, including far less time coding and writing about technology, but far more nautical miles traveled.

(the GPS track below is mostly accurate, but also has some odd artifact in it…)

Blogging (and Boating)

The trip has resulted in some alternative blogging about sailboats, and much of which has been on an entirely separate blog https://sailinghannahpenn.co.uk.

In fact, here is a picture of Hannah Penn from last week after hauling out of the water in Guadeloupe for form extra painting.

There is always lots to be doing while sailing, and second to sailing comes enjoyment. I have also been working 10h per week for Wikimedia Deutschland, and altogether this leaves sparse gaps for other things on the side like blogs.

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2021 Year Review

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This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Year Reviews

I have been doing some sort of year review since 2017, covering projects I work on, this blog, Github and Twitter. You can find the past posts using the tag #year-review.

2021 has seen the continuation of COVID-19 with the Omnicron variant making its first appearance in the last few months. Currently living in the UK we currently have the highest reported numbers of this new variant, as well as high covid levels overall. Who knows what 2022 will bring.

Blogging

At the time of writing this, I have written 43 blog posts this year, likely to leave my end of year total at ~47. That’s double what I wrote in 2020. In December I attempted to write a blog post a day, turning out to be too much, but it looks like I should be able to hit a secondary target of a post every 2 days, so ~15 in December.

  • ~40,000 page views, down from 47,664 (~16% decrease, but trending up looking across more years)
  • ~30,000+ visitors, down from 32,197 (~7% decrease)
  • ~47 posts, beating my previous record of 25 in 2018

It’s really easy to see how a single post can skew growth year by year. That post last year was Quickly clearing out your Facebook advert ‘interests’ which alone brought in 10k views, this year reducing to 3k. The peak post of 2020 only has around 6k views.

I quite like looking at most viewed posts so I can get some sort of gauge on what I should perhaps be writing more about, or projects that generally interest people. Development on Windows is the theme of the first 2 posts in my top 10. The majority of the rest of the top 10 are short posts covering problems I have encountered and solved over the years. And, also lasagnes… (more on that below)

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2020 Year Review

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This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Year Reviews

Another year is up, and what a year it has been. I finally open sourced wbstack, I complained about fake news, looked at Minecraft mods and took a look at how COVID-19 was affecting Wikipedia page views.

I make this post mainly for me to be able to look back at each year in a small snapshot. You can find similar posts for previous years in 2019, 2018 and 2017.

Currently I generate this post in a very manual way, sifting through data from WordPress stats, Twitter Analytics and my Github user page. Maybe I should change that for next year!

Blogging

On the whole this blog continues to grow year on year, both in terms of content and readers.

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2019 Year Review

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This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Year Reviews

A year or so ago I decided to start making yearly posts reviewing one of my online list. I’m a bit late this year considering it is April already, but it’s been one rollercoaster after another during the start of 2020.

Blog stats

  • 23,940 page views, up from 12,374 (93% increase)
  • 16,276 visitors, up from 8,578 (89% increase)
  • 11 posts, down from 25
  • 101 comments, up from 28

It’s a shame I wrote less, but I did go travelling for 6 months of the year, so it makes sense.

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2018 Year Review

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This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Year Reviews

12,374 page views (up from 7992) 8,578 visitors (up from 5250) 24 posts (up from 4) 28 comments (up from 13) Top 5 posts by page views in 2018: Guzzle 6 retry middleware, (still #1) Add Exif data back to Facebook images, (up from #4) Mislead by PHPUnit at() method, (down from #2) From 0 … Read more

2017 Year Review

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This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Year Reviews

2017 has been a great year with continued work at WMDE on both technical wishes projects and also Wikibase / Wikidata related areas. Along the way I shared a fair amount of this through this blog, although not as much as I would have liked. Hopefully I’ll be slightly more active in 2018. Here are … Read more