2021 Year in Review

Happy new year!

We made it through another year! Congratulations! Now we can look forward to 2022!

Blog

In 2021, I published 15 blog posts. This is far smaller than my 2020 total of 94, but the average of just over 1 per month is far more sustainable. My goal for 2022 is to publish at least 15 blog posts.

Google Analytics allows me to bring you the following overview of what happened with my blog in 2021.

I had a total of 11,055 pageviews in 2021, about twice my total pageviews from 2020 (which makes sense, since I started this blog in mid 2020). This also meets the goal I set for myself last year of hitting 10,000 pageviews in 2021. I'd like to hit 15,000 in 2021; this will require bringing you even more interesting content, which I'm looking forward to doing.

My 10 most popular posts this year were:

• How to roll back database to previous migration in EF Core
• Using Reflection to Set a Private Property in C#
• Creating a Downloadable .csv File in C#
• Using Markdown in VS Code
• Implementing a Static Builder using Extension Methods in C#
• Creating an Append-Only List Wrapper in C#
• Blazor Basics
• Use Stream Deck and 12Noon Display Changer to Change your Monitor's Screen Resolution
• Using Partials to Remove Duplication in Razor Pages
• Using BlazeMeter to Record JMeter Tests

If you have any suggestions for content you'd like to see me cover in 2022, I'd love to hear from you! Just submit something via the contact page or in the comments below!

Twitter

On Twitter, I'm @ilyanaDev. Currently, I have 149 followers - almost double what I had at the end of last year.

Books

I thought I'd add a section to my year in review this year to talk about some of the books I read this year - and there were a lot! To make it more palatable, I'll break it up into more technical books I read and books I read for fun.

Technical books

• Soft Skills: The Software Developer's Life Manual by John Sonmez
• Kanban by David J. Anderson and Donald G. Reinertsen
• Clean Code, Clean Architecture, and The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin

Fun books

You'll notice a lot more books in this category; for me, 2021 was a great year for reading!

• The Shannara trilogy by Terry Brooks - awesome fantasy trilogy!
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
• The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North
• The Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams - another incredible fantasy trilogy!
• The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm by Christopher Paolini - fantastic short stories in the world of the Inheritance Cycle
• What the Eyes Don't See by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha
• Seeing by Jose Saramago
• Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline
• His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman - I was a big fan of the Golden Compass movie as a kid, so I enjoyed the books' more nuanced and in-depth telling of the story
• Faithful Place by Tana French
• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
• Horse Sense by Al Ries and Jack Trout
• The first 4 books of The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey - I cannot recommend these books enough! They remind me of The Martian but with crazy awesome worldbuilding and character development and with incredibly detailed plotlines

Other

This year, I finally got to start attending college in person, which has been really fantastic! I'm studying aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan and loving every minute of it!

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 (or just want a list of things to consider as you reflect on your 2021), 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.