2023 in review
Table of Contents
When reflecting on 2023 it caught me by surprise how many things happened. The recency bias makes me forget everything that happened early in the year.
From a work perspective, it was an interesting year. Several management courses, attending lead-dev conference, and organizing a department-wide reorganization. Even though I still have no idea what I am doing sometimes, I notice the benefits of putting the reps in.
On a personal level, I enjoyed watching my twins grow up and celebrate their first birthday. They took their first steps, and nothing is safe anymore. Watching them growing up is one of the most heart warming experiences. I wanted to exercise regularly, and I am training to run a 10-mile (16,1K) in February. Further than I ever ran before. In the duality of life, my grandfather passed away, and I attended several funerals. But attended as many weddings as funerals.
I crushed my reading goal of 24 books. And managed to read 35 books in 2023.
The blog
I set myself the goal to publish a blog post every week. This worked well until somewhere in March. I hit a rough spot. The whole family got sick, and used my writing nights to get some extra sleep. I didn’t start writing again until June. A big change in my approach to writing was to start writing the stuff I care about. And not spend all my time playing the SEO game and seeing few results.
This year I’ve written 22 blog posts including this one, A slight decline from the 27 I did in 2022. The blog scored 5025 page views. A nice growth from 3470 in 2022.
Popular pages
My most popular pages in 2023 are:
Interesting to see that only one post was written this year. The others are post I’ve written before 2023. Good to see those posts still getting traffic.
Traffic sources
So how do people find my blog? If we take a look at the sources:
| Source | 2023 | 2022 |
| Google / Organic | 2141 | 1139 |
| Direct traffic | 545 | 616 |
| Slack | 294 | 35 |
| 256 | 71 | |
| 80 | 150 |
I stopped putting effort into SEO. A few older articles performed much better, and almost doubled the traffic. Seems like not all my effort spent on SEO was wasted time.
I’m happy that I found several Slack communities where I can share my work. The most surprising in this list is Linkedin. Sharing on Linkedin makes me experience impostor syndrome. Almost as I just started writing again. I don’t share all my content on LinkedIn. I suspect it’s the combination of more personal and non-tech followers. However, the content shared on LinkedIn performs well, compared to Twitter.
Social Media
With all the changes on Twitter, I noticed a big dip in people leaving the platform. Some changes in the algorithm were not in my favor as well. And interactions drop as a result. I tried building a consistency streak with Hypefury, but after about 2 months I saw barely any results. I did manage to get a few extra followers and go up to 242.
My content was booming on LinkedIn. The top 5 newsletters for new engineering managers had a big spike of impressions. 8100 folks saw the post. In total, I got over 20.000 impressions across all my posts. All content shared on LinkedIn seems to outperform Twitter by 5x at least. Even though sharing on LinkedIn makes me anxious and second-guess myself. I’m going to push myself to share more.
Medium
I started importing my stories on Medium as well. In the art & business of online writing, Nicolas Cole shares that you should not focus on the views of your blog, but on the total amount of views your writing gets. And platforms like Medium have distribution built in. An experiment I’m willing to try.
It’s a small start but my posts have gotten 68 views, and 27 reads in 2023.
Newsletter
I wanted to publish one newsletter a month. I’ve not been able to do that, but still managed to send out 5. I grew my total subscriber count to 21 and had 12 new subs (of which one also unsubbed).
I enjoy the new format I chose. I collect and share interesting articles & quotes. Completed by a personal intro and my own posts. You can subscribe below:
