A blogging tradition of many folks is summarizing the past year’s stats for their blog. A few years ago, I thought about doing that, and opted to instead create a dynamic page for each year. The result is my Posts by Year page and the individual years; for example here’s a link to Posts for 2022.
Well How Did I Get Here?
In , I’ll be wrapping up my twelfth year of blogging. As of 45% of my posts and 54% of my words are from the time since the onset of the Covid-19 📖 pandemic in the United States.
In , as part of my job going to remote only, I stopped commuting 2 hours per day. And due to a role change, I ended all of my day to day interactions with two toxic coworkers.
That freed up a considerable amount of time and emotional energy. I put that into improving my writing workflow; in particular learning Emacs 📖.
In , I changed employers to one that encouraged me to write and syndicate to their platform; Here’s a link to the posts I’ve syndicated to DEV.to. This meant that I could spend some of my work time writing about programming and software development careers and publish to that platform. In other words, I gained even more writing time in my day.
In , I again changed employers; with a focus on helping grow my team. Which means writing and knowledge sharing. Some of which I have repurposed into blog posts; which I continue to syndicate to DEV Community 📖.
Alongside those career changes, I shifted how I played Role Playing Games (RPGs 📖). I’d play with Discord and my text editor open, taking notes as we moved through our games. Those notes I could then quickly convert to Session Reports.
And as my personal threshold for online collaborative game play decreased, I shifted to Strider Mode 📖 play, in which I played RPGs in my Emacs instance; the game session was the blog post which was the game session.
I suppose I’ve taken to heart Sönke Ahrens’s admonition “do everything as if nothing counts other than writing.”
Writing is my job; be it writing software, playbooks, recommendations, meeting notes, issues, or documentation. Writing is my connection to others and myself.
Tables and Graphs
What would an end of year “summary” post be without a chart? I generated the Table 247: Number of Posts by Month (as of 2022-12-31) and it’s corresponding graph as of ; the table does not include this post.
| Month | Number of Posts | Normalized† |
|---|---|---|
| January | 80 | 77 |
| February | 64 | 69 |
| March | 46 | 45 |
| April | 80 | 80 |
| May | 53 | 51 |
| June | 74 | 74 |
| July | 73 | 71 |
| August | 77 | 75 |
| September | 69 | 69 |
| October | 64 | 62 |
| November | 53 | 53 |
| December | 94 | 91 |
| † The Normalized column represents counts normalized to a month with 30 days. | ||
To further bolster my claim of loving winter, or at least writing more during winter, I have the following Table 248: Number of Posts by Season (as of 2022-12-31).
| Season | Number of Posts |
|---|---|
| Winter | 238 |
| Spring | 179 |
| Summer | 224 |
| Fall | 186 |
Conclusion
I am thankful to have time and space to prioritize writing. This , I’ve started writing even more. Most of it doesn’t materialize as blog posts, but are instead my thinking through requirements or logic puzzles seeking a path forward in my work.
I struggle to think of “knowledge worker” decision that could’ve been better than adopting Emacs. It seems clumsy and sad for me to even consider splitting time between Visual Studio Code 📖 and something like Logseq 📖.