2020 for Developers

Woah, what a year! I just read through my article from last year, and, boy, did we not see this coming!

I did not set myself any goals for this year, and I have been scaling down ever since.

The Good

But I did actually achieve two things in 2020!

First, I published a whopping 31 articles in 2020. That is really quite a lot!

Two of those 31 articles were guest posts, first by Urs Boller, then by Ben Wedenik. The biggest chunk was the mini-series on the Mobile SDKs, though, which ran through the first two months of the year, when we were all waking up to the reality of a global pandemic.

Secondly, that stupid s_code article is finally off the top of the list!

For the first time, an article beat it in popularity, and that article was A Manifesto for Analytics & Optimisation Consultants. Well done, my dear readers, and thank you!

If you wonder why this is dear to my heart, just think about it: About 1000 people come to my blog via a horribly outdated and completely irrelevant article, every year. I don’t know, but somehow, I don’t like that.

The Bad

Still in decline.

The overall views have gone down, and this time, the visitors have gone down a bit, too.

My theory last year was that if I wrote more articles, that trend could be reversed. Seems I was wrong. My backup theory was that at some point around the peak, I was cross-posting articles to Linkedin, and that I attracted a lot of traffic that way. That may be the case, but this year was not a year to test that, I simple didn’t have the energy.

If you have any alternative theories, or you want to reassure me, maybe simply because your blog sees the same trend, feel free.

The Ugly

I was vaguely aware of how data collection for Analytics would evolve for some time, but I wasn’t able to blog about it because it wasn’t public.

Then it was announced, and it was good to see how everybody else saw similar potential to what I saw. I wanted to explore the alloy.js, server-side Launch, and XDM, and I wanted to write a lot about it.

In the end, I didn’t. I simply couldn’t do it. I went through a lot of 2019 and most of 2020 thinking I’d still do it, but eventually, I had to admit that I wouldn’t.

I’m not even secretly promising myself to do it in 2021. If anything, 2020 has shown me that it is a good idea to be very humble about what you might be able to achieve.

Therefore, I will not set any goals for next year, either. We will see what happens. Maybe the old article will fall further behind (I certainly hope so!). Maybe I can stop the decline, and maybe I’ll manage to better work with my queue, again.

That would be good.

Behind all that, of course, is the fuzzy warm feeling I get when I post an article, and when someone likes it. And the even warmer feeling when someone uses one of the articles, and maybe asks a question, or posts their experiences.

That is what makes this worth the effort!

If you want to hear me speak about the Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK (fka “Alloy”), feel free to signup for Adam Greco’s amazing “Search Discovery Education Community“. You can do that here.

My session will happen on the 5th of January at 10.30 CST / 17:30 CET / 16.30 UTC