My wife has a go-to birthday question: Name the best thing and the worst thing about the past year. We realized that she has a habit of asking this for the New Year as well.
Many of our family and friends have birthdays that fall around the holiday season, so the question becomes somewhat repetitive. As we sat at what will end up being our New Year’s celebration (she’s out of town over the holiday), we came up with a new question.
What are you most excited about in the coming year?
She and I broke this down into “personally and professionally,” which gave us some interesting talking points. Personally, we both identified some new travel destinations. After all, I have some new scuba gear I need to take for a test dive.
Professionally, well, I had a pretty lengthy reflection on my years at Four Rivers and Accruent back in October. That was, however, primarily a gaze into the past. As I considered what’s in store in 2024, I realized that there are some pretty exciting things happening at my new company. These things give me a chance to apply what I have learned in my years of software engineering, all while learning new and exciting technologies.
Growing my “brand”
I really don’t like to use the term “brand” to describe what I am doing here. I use it, though, because it pretty accurately describes what I would ultimately like to do.
My goal with this publication is to make what I do fun. I mean, it is fun to me, and I know it is fun to others, so why not give that excitement a voice. Do I refer back to this blog as a reference for things I have done? Absolutely! It has become a great reference for me on its own, and hopefully others find some use in its pages.
Through the last year, I have done a better job of being consistent in terms of generating content. I had, oddly, 35 posts in 2021 an 2022, and I am up to 76 posts in 2023 (this one makes 77). This equates to a post about every 5 days. My goal is a post every 4 days, so I’m pretty close.
As to content quality, well, that’s harder to judge. My most popular pages, by far, are the write-ups with details instructions. Sadly, my anecdotes do not far so well on content. That said, it is far easier to write the anecdotes than it is the write-ups, but, I guess you get out what you put in.
So my goals for this blog in the coming year are two-fold:
- Get closer to my “post every 4 days metrics”
- Increase the number of technical write-ups
That last one gets difficult, as I cannot divulge work I do that remains IP for my company. Most of my technical write-ups end up being small, general pieces of a larger puzzle. So I’ll have to figure out how to get more creative in that regard.
Happy New Year!
It’s good to have goals. I’ve shared some of mine, and hopefully you have some of your own. In the meantime, I wish anyone reading this the best of luck in the new year!
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