Year In Review

One of the main reasons that I write is for reflection. Blogging gives me a history of what I was interested in and when. In 2008, I posted the Smörgåsbord. I skipped 2009, for whatever reason, but 2010 will not suffer the same fate.

Bang!

The first post of the year was pretty huge for me. It was the first post using Harmony, the website management system that we are building at Ordered List. We even released it for public consumption on August 3rd.

Post number two was my most popular post of all time. It took off so fast that I could not even enjoy it. I immediately had to add page caching to Harmony so it could handle the load.

I Have No Talent had 25k views in the first two days, but that did not prepare me for day three. Day three ended with over 60k views and by the time the dust settled on day four, it was over 100k views. Crazy!

Below is a screenshot of views for the entire year. Note how most of the year looks like a flat line next to the no talent post and the other hit of the year, Stop Googling.

Thoughts

Every year I try to do a few posts that are just thoughts I have been having or that someone else had and I respect.

This year I posted on Just in Time, Not Just in Case, Correct, Beautiful, Fast, In That Order, and Improving Your Methods. Each of these posts are something I believe really strongly in.

Presentations

This was the year of speaking for me. There were a few stretches where I was prepping for a presentation every other week. That is definitely a bit hectic when each presentation is on a new and different topic.

A few of the highlights were keynoting the Great Lakes Ruby Bash on my lack of talent, talking about MongoMapper at MongoSF, and teaching how to steal at RailsConf 2010.

I even posted on how to Improve Your Presentations in Under $50. If you are presenting any time soon, definitely check that post out.

Projects

This was the year of the tiny project for me. I have worked on so many applications now that I am beginning to see a lot of patterns. Each time I repeated myself, I did my best to move the abstraction into its own gem and share it for all or none to use.

This year, I released Canable to help with permissions, Joint to make file uploads with GridFS easy, Whois to aid in naming your project, Bin for caching in Mongo, Plucky for sexy Mongo querying, Hunt for easy search with Mongo, and Scam a simple enum/fake model helper.

In addition to the aforementioned new projects, I released several updates to MongoMapper, including plugins, identity map, and scopes.

I also tried to share some of what I learned building MongoMapper in Creating Duplicable Objects and Over-ridable Accessors, and The Chain Gang.

Numbers

Though I posted about half as many times as in 2009, I feel the quality went way up. In total, RailsTips garnered over 700,000 views in 2010. Blows my mind that it has grown to that in three and half years.

Even more mid blowing is how much I have grown in that time. From barely knowing Rails, to creating one of the more popular object mappers. From working at Notre Dame, to owning my own business.

I feel that all of this really is a testament to what a lot hard work can result in. I cannot wait to see what 2011 brings.