2020 Year in Review
— year in review — 3 min read
Happy new year!
Another year is behind us, and what a year 2020 was! If you're anything like me, the pandemic dominated your life this year.
Blog
If not for the pandemic, I never would have started this blog, so that's one silver lining for me out of that situation.
My first post ever, Setting up a work Gmail, was published on June 1st, 2020.
In 2020, I published a total of 94 blog posts, at a (completely unsustainable) rate of 13 per month. I also had 4,897 pageviews in 2020.
Here's my overview from Google Analytics (Which is something you should definitely set up if you have a website):
You'll notice a few big spikes in early and late November, which coincide with the publications of Getting Started with IdentityServer in an ASPNET Core Application and AntiPatterns, which ended up being among my most popular articles this year.
My 10 most popular posts this year were:
- AntiPatterns (by a mile! This post got 12% of all my site's pageviews in 2020, compared to 6% for the next highest post)
- Getting Started with IdentityServer in an ASPNET Core Application
- Notes from SOLID Principles of Object Oriented Design Pluralsight Course
- The Unit of Work Pattern
- The FizzBuzz Kata Step-By-Step
- Using Markdown in VS Code
- The Adapter Pattern
- The Template Method Pattern
- Notes from Creating N-Tier Applications in C#, Part 1 Pluralsight Course
- The Flyweight Pattern
Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the progress of my blog this year. My goals for the next year are to continue posting regularly, even when life gets busy. I'd also like to hit 10,000 pageviews during 2021. Since I only had the blog for a bit more than half of 2020 and almost got to 5,000 pageviews, this seems like a reasonable goal.
If you have any suggestions for content you'd like to see me cover in 2021, I'd love to hear from you! Just submit something via the contact page or in the comments below!
Another new thing I did this year was get a Twitter account, where I'm @ilyanaDev. I got the account in June, and since then I've acquired 82 followers.
Other
Due to COVID, I've been stuck at home since March, but I've still had some notable accomplishments this year including starting this blog, creating a website for the documentary I finished in 2019, and graduating high school. It's been an exciting year, but I hope 2021 will be a bit more calm and have some sense of normalcy, which 2020 decidedly did not have.
One final note: thank you to Steve Smith (aka Ardalis), for putting out this great Year in Review Post Checklist! If you read his checklist, you'll notice that I only used a couple of his suggestions, but the rest of them gave me a lot to think about as far as what other content I can create in the future. If you have a blog or are thinking about starting one, that's definitely a good post to check out.
Thanks for reading! I hope you find this and other articles here at ilyanaDev helpful! Be sure to follow me on Twitter @ilyanaDev.