Taking A Break

Another year draws to a close and it's time to take a break.

I'm pretty tired.

My intent is to resume sometime during January 2023.

But before I disappear for a few weeks, I think I'll dump some statistics, because I find this sort of stuff interesting, and I hope you will as well.

Word Salad

For this year, I've made one post every single week without fail since 14 January 2022.

I wrote a grand total of 61148 words over the course of the year, broken down into 49 distinct blog posts. Creating those posts took me 6105 minutes (~101 hours).

Considering that there are only 96388 words in total on this blog, the content delivered this year represents ~60% of the available content.

Not a bad effort at all.

I think I've got a good rhythm going these days, so it's not as much of a struggle as it once was. As long as I do a little bit each day, it's entirely manageable. I still get anxious when I remember that I have deadlines, but I think that's just how my brain works, so I've come to terms with it.

But Does Anyone Read Them?

The Ghost platform tells me that I have 13 subscribers, which were 92% engaged over the last 30 days. I'm assuming engaged means that the subscriber read at least one blog post via email in that time period.

That number hasn't changed at all this year, which makes me a little bit sad, but maybe it's not actually important? I really do enjoy writing, and if people happen to read what I write, that's a bonus.

Still, it would be remiss of me to not use this opportunity to encourage you to subscribe with this handy dandy button.

Moving on, Google Analytics tells me that I currently have 43 30-day users. The last time I looked, this was ~55, but it goes up and down over time. This year's peak was 76.

I don't know what, if any, conclusions I should draw from this.

On one hand, it's pretty amazing that that many people actually bother to read the words that I write. I should be thankful for what I have.

On the other hand, bigger numbers make brain go buzz, so brain want bigger numbers. External validation can be a big motivator, but it's also a fickle beast, and internal motivation is a hell of a lot more reliable and stable.

Or at least that's what I tell myself anyway.

Okay, What Do People Actually Read?

Digging into the analytics a little bit more, I can also see the blog posts that were read the most over the year.

So without further ado, and in most-read order, I present to you the Top 5 posts of the year!

The one where I stole someone else's idea about going for walks with a remote team in order to build relationships.

Walk This Way

I don’t know about you, but now that I no longer share an office with myco-workers, I find it moderately difficult to connect with them. When you nolonger regularly occupy the same physical space as the people you work with, itquickly becomes obvious how much of that

People and PandemoniumTodd Bowles

The one where I described the experience of shadowing another engineering manager to steal their secrets.

What I Did In The Shadows

I like knowing things. I like having enough different pieces of information floating around in my head such that I can create connections between them. To spin an insane spiderweb that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. A while back I wrote about shadowing other Engineering Managers

People and PandemoniumTodd Bowles

The one where I regaled you with a tale on combining Minecraft and Trello as a ShipIt project.

More Creepers Than Expected

One of the things that I really appreciate about Atlassian is the regularinnovation events. I’ve used those events to go on a few great innovation adventures already, likethe time I vaguely helped to build a forge app[https://www.peopleandpandemonium.com/back-to-the-forge/] and that other time I…

People and PandemoniumTodd Bowles

The one where I introduced the feature leading burnout reduction initiative that I'm helping out with.

Burn After Leading, Part 1

It isn’t easy being responsible for delivering something. First you have to understand what it is and what difference it’s going to make, then you have to put some sort of plan together, then you have to track progress against that plan, you need to intervene if things aren’t on

People and PandemoniumTodd Bowles

The one where I said I was going to stream Elden Ring for charity.

Your Stream, Show It To Me

6 hours and ~$540 in donations for Ukraine relief later and we’re done. Thanks to everyone who stopped by see what I was doing, but an even bigger thankyou to everyone that helped out and spent some of their valuable time chattingwith me in Discord while I streamed

People and PandemoniumTodd Bowles

I'm sad that none of my short stories hit the Top 5, but it's pretty niche content so I'm not all that surprised.

Until Next Time

And on that note, we're done here.

Thank you for reading this post and other posts and responding to surveys and just generally existing and taking the time to pay attention to something that I'm creating.

You're awesome.

See you next year!