What I've learned in a year

I have now been blogging for one full year. In the past year I've done one installment of the Starting From Scratch series on Android, a series about building a mobile app, 2 Back To The Basics installments covering Binary Trees and Hash Tables, and a whole lot of random posts about software development. So what have I learned over the past year of writing a technology blog.

Ideas aren't as hard to come by as I would have thought

Over the past year I've learned that I have a lot more to talk about than I originally thought I would. When I originally started this blog in Oct 2013 I wasn't sure what the heck I was going to talk about each week. While I wouldn't say I have a book of ideas just laying around, I haven't had trouble coming up with a topic each week. I've probably got about a dozen or so post ideas sitting in the queue just waiting to be written.

A weekly post is a good pace

When I set out to start this blog I wasn't sure on which end of the spectrum my blog was going to fall. One side of the spectrum is a Twitter like blog. The type where you have a bunch of frequent but short (as short as one sentence sometimes) posts. On the other side of the spectrum you have article like blogs. These are blogs that read like a magazine or newspaper article. They're usually chock full of information and other require multiple sittings to read through.

I've found myself somewhere in the middle, slightly skewed more toward article length. I really like doing the multi-part series as well as the little nuggests of things I've learned.

Write a lot and then take time to think

I will usually write three or four blog posts at a time and then stew on my thoughts for a couple of weeks. I feel like it really helps me understand HOW I want to write about WHAT I write. Often I'll have an idea which I think about one way, and then after writing about it will come back and edit it from a different perspective. It's almost been like a conversation with myself.

I still don't know who my target audience is

And I'm okay with that. Sometimes I want to write a really technical article. I'll go deep into an algorithm and feel great about it. Sometimes I want to write a high level about something that's applicable to life outside of software development (even if it's a post about software).

I'm just happy to be writing.

PC marketshare

Over the life of my blog 38% have visited from Windows, 37% have visited from Mac, a smaller than I expected 6% have visited from Linux, and then a hodgepodge of OS's make up the rest (including mobile).

I consume the blogs I follow almost entirely on my mobile devices (90% phone and 10% tablet). So it was a bit surprising to me that the vast majority of blog readers were doing so on desktop machines. I think a lot of this has to do with the sources of my traffic. But I'm not wholly convinced.

I'm just glad to be here

Whether you've been reading this blog from the beginning or this is your first week, I hope you're enjoying what you're finding here. Writing is a form of art to me. I enjoy it, it relaxes me, and it makes me feel connected to humanity.

Thanks for taking the time out of your day to read my blog :)