This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
Hello! Another year is about to pass, just a year ago today, I was still struggling to outline plans and goals, and in a blink, here I am today, sharing with you what I have accomplished. It is even more meaningful to share this with the community Dev.to.
But first, I will reveal some statistics of mine.
The Statistics
In 2024, I wrote an additional 56 new articles, totaling over 100,000 words. It's amazing! Even I can't imagine writing that much. I welcomed 89 new members. Especially after launching the anonymous comment feature, I received an additional 95 new comments across all articles. Additionally, I committed to maintaining a daily post in the Threads section for over 5 months. As of now, the number of short posts has reached 159, and it will continue to grow in the future.
It's a bit disappointing that the email newsletter sign-up feature flopped, recording only 4 subscribers. On the other hand, the number of people subscribing to new post notifications in the browser is 142. Of these, about 60 are active users (who frequently receive notifications of new posts).
So what about reader activity?
There have been over 77,000 views across all articles, along with more than 40,000 new users. The number of active users is over 44,000. This means about 4,000 readers return to the blog more frequently.
Can you guess which article was read the most? That would be Using GPT-4 for Free with Github Copilot with over 9.5k views. Next is the blog's "signature" article How to Delete a Commit That Has Been Pushed?. The most visited page is the homepage with over 12k views. The most impressive is the Threads page, which, despite being newly created, still made it to the "top" 9 most visited pages.
Compared to 2023, how did these figures grow or decline?
Fortunately, most metrics have increased. According to statistics from Google Analytics, the number of active users has increased nearly 73% compared to last year, with new users up by 60%. The only downside is that the average reading time for articles has decreased by 30%. I wonder if it’s because my writing has gotten worse, so no one bothers to read anymore, or if people are gradually losing patience with long articles 😅.
When it comes to traffic sources, users are still finding the blog through Google, which remains in first place, increasing by over 50%. One thing that shocked me is that the number of direct visitors has increased by nearly 190%. Wow! This means they are proactively visiting without needing to go through Google anymore.
Furthermore, the blog has shown signs of appearing in search results from AI-based search engines like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Bing...
What have I learned?
2024 was also the time I became interested in the concept of Serverless. I learned and worked more with this new architecture. Serverless helps me minimize costs while alleviating concerns about system operation.
I took an interest in Rust and learned it. During my learning process, I documented and created a series of articles about my self-learning journey. I'm glad to see a lot of interest. Although I still can't use it fluently, to be honest, it's very powerful. I hope to apply Rust soon in the near future.
With the help of a brother, I learned a lot about large language models, RAG, and Generative AI. I applied artificial intelligence in many features of the product while enhancing my work productivity. Notably, the blog has integrated many features such as smart search or related post suggestions to enhance user experience.
Finally, I "Tear Down and Rebuild" my blog, replacing it with a newer tech stack. I recounted this process in an article. So far, everything is working perfectly.
Reflecting on the Goals of 2024:
In 2024, I will maintain all activities like last year. I will continue learning, writing, and spreading motivation, enjoying the spirit of coffee & books.
It's great that my enthusiasm and spirit have not diminished. I have learned many new things, many new technologies, and especially released an open-source personal note-taking app within 3 months. It's called OpenNotas. Simple, secure, focused on writing. Many articles you read originated from here 😄.
I have read many new books. Among them, I must mention notable literary works from Vietnam and abroad. They are very good! I cannot deny how important reading influences my writing skills.
Not stopping there, I hope that in 2024 I will elevate my personal brand, making more people know about me, even more!
I have actively participated in social media, especially Facebook and recently Threads. I have been diligent about reading more articles, interacting more with everyone, and proactively making friends and exchanging with many people I hadn’t known before. Wow, I wonder if that’s enough to make people know about me more? Surely it's a little bit 😅.
Another memorable milestone is posting on Dev.to and receiving a lot of attention from everyone. I have over 6,000 followers now. Thank you all for your interest in me.
Goals for 2025
In the new year, I will definitely maintain my old habits. At the same time, this is a challenging time to break through and harvest more results from the foundations I have laid for a long time. Thank you and wish everyone achieves all their goals in the new year 2025.
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