2017 in review

I began my round of 2016 with how eventful it was, and 2017 continued to deliver major world events that shook countries, cities and people. Despite this, I had a largely positive year, switching from an employee back to a contractor again, which was a largely positive move. I changed my major outlet from SitePoint to DZone, added a handful of others, wrote a lot of content marketing posts for tech companies, wrote a book and (nearly) finished a video course. On top of all that I travelled to many places, including cities and countries I had never been to before.

Writing

{% assign 2017posts = site.posts | where:“date”,“2017” | where:“categories”,“Chris” %}

In 2017, I wrote approximately {{ 2017posts.size }} articles, blog posts and tutorials. In addition to this I contributed documentation to at least four major clients and contributed to Apache Flink, Webpack, Kubernetes and Docker amongst other open source projects.

The most popular on my Medium account remained ‘A documentation crash course’, closely followed by ‘Making Atom even more awesome’, from 2017 it was ‘A Switchers Tale - My weeks with Linux’. Most popular on DZone was ‘Teaching Children to Code’. I don’t have access to statistics for any of my other outlets, but from ‘feeling’ I would say that my most popular post for Code Ship was ‘A Comparison of Docker GUIs’ and ‘Automating Screenshots in Documentation’, and on OverOps ‘Docker Monitoring: 5 Methods for Monitoring Java Applications in Docker’.

Video and audio

{% assign 2017podcast = site.posts | where:“type”,“podcast” %}

In 2017 I experimented with the format of the podcast I began in 2016, eventually settling on a regular mixture of one-on-one interviews and links shows with my co-host, Cate Lawrence, and our most popular episode was an an interview with Scott Heiferman, founder of Meetup. I also contribute to the monthly podcast for documentarians, The “Write the Docs” podcast, and its most popular episode was xx. Overall, this equals {{ 2017podcast.size }} podcast episodes. On the surface, I didn’t create too many videos, but have been working on a video course for Manning since April, which is nearly finished.

Presentations

{% assign 2017events = site.events | where:“date”,“2017” %} I spoke at, or reported on approximately {{2017events.size}} conferences and meetups in 12 countries, not including the roughly 2 a week I attend locally on a regular basis.

Looking forward to 2018

In all honesty, that later half of 2017 has been so busy, that I haven’t given much thought to plans for 2018. A lot of my personal and non-professional projects went on hiatus, and I’m trying to work a little less to spend more time on my gaming and non-fiction ideas. We shall see, hope and dream.