Table of Contents

Another year of blogging! Was it good or bad? What’s the plan now? What were the most popular posts?

First of all, please answer those quick questions: Bartek’s Coding Blog in 2016

The Story  

Keeping things short I’d like to point out four major things that happened this year:

  • Posting schedule - I usually posted a new article every second week! Surprisingly, such routine gives much more ideas and energy to create new things. Much better than writing only when you have huge motivation/good topic.
  • ‘Rebranded’ a bit: I’ve understood that I cannot write about everything… it’s better to be more focused. So during my vacation break I’ve decided to focus on Core C++, Modern C++, some native coding stuff and probably performance optimization. Previously I did also some graphics/gamedev.
  • Newsletter was started - the mailing list is getting bigger and bigger, I am learning how to write better emails. Hopefully, those emails will also add some value to the blog. I plan not only to include recent post info but some bonus content as well. Sign up if you haven’t already! :)
  • Crazy reception of my ‘coding without Google’. In one day I got around 80k views, it’s around 25% of the total page views for the whole year! What’s funny this is relatively easy article, only my thoughts, stories, not a heavy C++ tutorial… but that’s how the internet works :)

Some issues

At the end of July I wanted to take one or two months of break, but it took me three months to return to blogging :) I’ve noticed that having a break makes you quite lazy and it’s hard to go back to the routine again. Ideally, I plan to have some post buffer so I could still get some time off, but not too much.

I know that my domain name is not perfect. But I decided to keep it more personal, and also blog title is now “Bartek’s coding blog” instead of Code and Graphics. I want to be my coding space, and maybe it will be a good starting point for some other future projects (with a better domain).

Some Stats  

1st January 2016 till 25th December 2016:

  • Visits: 345 119 (3x more than the previous year!)
  • Unique visitors: 116 194 (2x more than the past year!)
  • Twitterfollowers: 970

graphics, since 1st June

Coding without Google ~90k views

This post was a huge surprise for me. Instead of writing about technical stuff, I just wrote a bit of my story plus some thoughts about workflow… and it got massive attention. In one day it was viewed around 80k times! On my stats, it’s an outlier result.

The Matrix Updated ~23k views

In the above post, I’ve gone and dug out a very old project, written in Allegro Game Library. The code was a bit updated, so at least I could run in on modern hardware and OS.

C++ Status at the end of 2015 ~22k views

As usually, I try to make a C++ status update at the end of a year. This was my first post after a longer break, so I was very happy to see that people want to read it. Thanks!

Please declare your variables as const

  • 13k views

Very successful post that appeared in December this year. I knew it might be an intriguing topic, but I didn’t assume it would get so many comments. I plan to write a follow-up for this since it appears there is a conflict between const and move operations.

Custom Deleters for C++ Smart Pointers

  • 12k views

The text was inspired by one refactoring session where I tried to use unique_ptr in some legacy code. The case was good enough to land as a separate story and a blog post.

  • Notes on C++ SFINAE - a huge amount of work, lots of investigation, lots of learning. But I am glad to finalize this post. It was done in several months!
  • 11 Debugging Tips That Will Save Your Time - it took me a lot of time to prepare that list of tips. A lot of work, but eventually a good reception. An extended version of those tips landed in Visual Studio Magazine, see this post for more info.
  • Micro benchmarking libraries for C++ - reviews of testing libraries that usually should improve your performance tests. They give a lot of flexibility and a good set of reports. Much better than a custom simple approach.
  • Select + Mouse + OpenGL - I haven’t updated this post for a long time… but it still appears in my stats in a relatively good place! Thanks! I know I should update it to modern OpenGL, but I cannot promise anything at the moment.

Summary  

As a reminder, if you haven’t already filled it: please give me your feedback through:

Bartek’s Coding Blog in 2016.

This was a good year for the blog I think. The blog didn’t earn 1mln of $$, and I hadn’t become an Internet rockstar… but still it was a lot of fun :) I’ve learned a lot, increased my motivation, creativity, perseverance. And I hope you also got some valuable content.

Some plans  

  • Improve the posting pipeline. Keep the quality (or improve it), but reduce the time needed to publish an article.
  • Keep the plan, don’t take too many breaks :)
  • Have the buffer of posts
  • Start with some products? Like little self-contained tutorials? Tips and tricks? bonus content?
  • Improve my writing.
  • Write more guest posts

BTW: maybe it’s a good start thinking about your blog? What topics could you write about? I highly recommend writing down your ideas; other developers might be happy to read it. A blogging course from simpleprogrammer.com might help you with that, check it out here: link. I took that course some time ago, and it was pretty good.