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2022 - A year in review

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9 min read

My blog has been neglected for the last few months. Writing a year review is my way of making amendments to start writing back and reflecting on the year gone by.

It’s been a good year that allowed me to focus on myself. I do not feel one bit guilty about not writing enough or creating enough. I spent most of my time prior to this year in a burnout state. I did not want to repeat that. Getting over burnout is tricky, and I am not sure if I am completely over it, but I often feel that I am coping better than before.

Right now, I’m still trying to balance my life and work and find a way to fit the new endeavors I’m seeking to pursue in between.

Starting the year with a new job

I started the year by switching jobs in a new role as a Senior Content Developer at Vercel.

I was excited to work full-time on the docs team. In the past year, I have often felt like I have been working towards this career path. I started at the end of January and left it at the end of April.

During my time there, I learned a lot about working on a team full of creative and hyper-focused people who shared a love for writing and creating content like mine. But unfortunately, it was a short adventure. I felt left out as the weeks passed. Besides writing in tech, I’ve been a part of React Native community since almost the beginning of my career. So that shift in tech focus I was working daily was a huge leap to take mentally.

App.js conf 2022

App.js conference has been a vital part of my professional career. I forgot what it felt like to be at a tech conference (since the last one I attended was in 2019) and in the end, it was an amazing experience.

Meeting with beautiful and like-minded people who share their work and interesting ways of solving problems is always fascinating and curiosity-engaging. Not only one gets to see the new and exciting upcoming stuff but also meeting people in person after such a long and limited human exposure felt like it was the first time.

Me with friends at the App.js conference in June 2022

It was a wonderful experience to attend it in person, meet old friends, make new ones and travel once again. Everything from the venue, the beautiful city of Krakow, the quality talks, and the MCs, was a great experience. Kudos to the organizers for hosting it and providing that altogether!

Joining Expo

I joined Expo at the end of June 2022. Leaving my previous role, traveling and attending a tech conference, and getting the new opportunity was like a full circle. I am working majorly on the docs. Other areas of my work include engaging with the community.

Before joining, I’d been familiar with the team and their work for four years. From the outside, I know the tremendous amount of hard work the whole team puts in. Driving React Native ecosystem forward, making exponential improvements with each SDK version, focusing on better tooling, Developer Experience (DX), and adding support for native modules. After joining, it is exciting to observe that closely and be a part of it every day!

I wrote 21 articles

I enjoy the process of writing for many reasons. One is that I get to learn something new and deepen my understanding of a topic. Another is pretending to be the first user and trying to understand a way of solving a specific problem.

It also opens doors for me to explore new opportunities. This year, I got to work with some of the publications I have been working with for a long time such as Jscrambler and Logrocket. Two new additions where I published a couple of tutorials as a guest author for Sentry and FlyCode.

It also turns out people like to read them too. Here are some of the most popular posts I wrote this year:

I redesigned my blog

My blog is one of the most consistent things in my life. This year, I decided to finally move it to Next.js (if you have been reading this post from the top, you might have realized why 😄). It was fun to do it and to learn new frameworks such as Next.js and Chakra UI.and and implement some of the tweaks that have been on my backlog for a while. I have decided to call the current version 9. Honestly, there have been so many changes and tweaks since I started it in 2019 that I have lost track in the past.

My blog in numbers

I moved away from Google Universal Analytics since their public announcement about GA4 to Fathom in the middle of March. However, I did not remove Google Analytics from my blog after I realized that I might lose historical data for the first three months.

Overall I got a pretty consistent readership this year with over 150k+ views:

Yearly stats from Google Analytics 3

It is also interesting to see that what’s driving most of the traffic is a mixture of both old and new articles:

This year, both old and new articles are driving traffic to my blog

Also that visitors are coming mostly through organic search:

Most traffic is organic

I occasionally cross-posted my articles on Medium, Dev.to and Hashnode. Not as much as I would like to since I didn’t spend that much time writing.

Dev.to is my primary platform to focus on cross-posting this year. I did manage to get 45k+ views.

Dev.to stats, in a nutshell, this year

Hackernoon award

Awesome folks at Hackernoon nominated me for two categories in the Noonies 2022 awards. One of the categories was Most authentic Developer Advocate of the year.

I ended up winning the award (to my surprise). A huge thanks to anyone who voted for me (and is reading this post 🤗). I’m humbled by the recognition

Noonies 2022 award for most authentic developer advocate of the year.

Newsletter saga continues

Less writing equals less number of issues. I did manage to send out a newsletter anytime I had something to share. However, this project was also abandoned for the last four or five months.

Last year, I was charmed by Revue and decided to jump on the wagon. Unfortunately, however, Twitter’s new owners have decided to close it down. After moving to Revue, I thought I could stick with the service for some time, but the newsletter saga continues.

I have decided to move to Substack. I have used it in the past, and it’s a good service. If you haven’t already subscribed and would like to, here is the link: amanhimself.substack.com. Even though Revue did allow migrating existing subscribers to Substack, there was no way of migrating the previous issues.

Highlights from my GitHub

A couple of years back, I started to maintain a single repo for all the demos and example apps I write using React Native and Expo. These example apps are part of the tutorials you see on this blog. To my surprise, it reached 700+ stars. It’s still being actively maintained by me and occasional PRs from other contributors.

I also continued to maintain the Expo Community project that integrates Firebase JS SDK in an Expo app. After being involved directly with the changes in the latest Expo SDK around Firebase, I planned out a new version of this project. Even after working on official integration documentation and guides, I feel this project can still serve as an additional resource.

I made a lot of commits

Working on open-source projects makes the GitHub chart go green:

A glimpse of activity on my GitHub account

A big shout and a huge thanks to folks who sponsored me on GitHub this year!

Reading

I did manage to go through some good books this year. Here are some of my picks that I enjoyed reading:

Traveling

I did manage to escape on two occasions but overall did not travel as much as I would have liked to.

Wrapping up

I have been writing yearly reviews since 2020. It’s fun for me to look back over what I did and what I focused on last year or where my time went.

Thank you all for reading this post or reading any other post!

That’s it for now. Happy New Year!


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I'm a software developer and technical writer. On this blog, I share my learnings about both fields. Recently, I have begun exploring other topics, so don't be surprised if you find something new here.

Currently, working as a documentation lead at Expo.