2022 Content Roundup – Year in Review
This has been an interesting year where I’ve been quite productive, but traveling and conferences have made me productive in different ways than I had been the past two years.
So here’s what I was up to in 2022, let’s dig in…
Life in a casa de Fayock
This year we traveled a lot! My wife and son traveled with me to most of the conferences in the first half of the year. It was amazing, but exhausting trying to travel with a 1 year old who just wants to run everywhere!
That said, it’s been amazing getting to see my son grow up, including things he’s learning and getting to see his personality evolve. I’m excited about the thought of being able to show him some of those pictures of him in other countries as a baby.
Working at Cloudinary
It’s been just over a year now since I joined Cloudinary in November 2021.
I’ve been having a blast working here, there’s always too many options to pick from in terms of content and projects to work on, which makes it both frustrating that I don’t have 100 more hours every week to do everything I want, but also amazing that there’s a lot of fun projects to work on.
I’m looking forward to building bigger initiatives this year to try to maximize my impact!
I’m a Star!
This year I was selected as a GitHub Star!!
Wow, what an honor. I’m always happy to hear that my work has helped someone become more productive in some capacity, but it’s so cool to get the recognition from GitHub for that work.
Now I have to continue living up to those high expectations! 🙂
Content Roundup
Enough about me (wait…), let’s jump into the content!
Articles
This year I focused primarily on writing for spacejelly.dev.
- 16 on spacejelly.dev
- 3 on cloudinary.com
- 2 on mediajams.dev
- 1 on netlify.com
- 1 on harperdb.com
- 1 on freecodecamp.org
24 total articles
Last year I was at 46! Definitely significantly lower, but given my other productivity, I’m happy with my year.
This upcoming year, I plan to travel a lot less, so I anticipate either more content or more code-based projects (or both!).
2022 spacejelly.dev Stats
This year I continued to see steady growth on spacejelly.dev.
Last year I had a total 60.6k total pageviews where this year I got more than 4 times that amount, though I can’t remember if early march of last year is when I started or if that’s when I added Analytics, either way, you can see the growth in the chart above is strong.
The vast majority of this traffic comes from organic search via Google and that’s totally expected.
I don’t really have a marketing engine nor a huge audience on social media, so I do what I can to write rich, helpful content with use-case oriented topics that seemingly do well with search.
Numbers reported are from Jan 1 through Dec 28, 2022
Top 2022 spacejelly.dev Articles by Pageviews
- 45,320 – How to Save State to LocalStorage & Persist on Refresh with React.js
- 22,782 – How to Create Pages in Next.js with Static & Dynamic Data
- 19,291 – How to Trigger a Function when Scrolling to an Element in React Intersection Observer
- 15,128 – How to Create CSS Custom Properties That Dynamically Update with React & JavaScript
- 13,263 – How to Add Custom Dynamic Favicons in React & Next.js
Numbers reported are from Jan 1 through Dec 28, 2022
Videos
Videos usually fall along the same lines as articles, where I generally create 1 video for YouTube and 1 article for spacejelly.dev together when publishing.
Between experimenting and courses, that’s not the entire story every year, but generally helps keep things on track.
I also started a new series for Cloudinary called Dev Hints that are very short videos meant to explain a specific feature. It’s been fun and easy to crank out.
- 22 on youtube.com/colbyfayock
- 18 on egghead.io
- 15 on youtube.com/cloudinary
55 total videos
Last year I had 76 videos on YouTube alone! 😱 What a different year this has been.
2022 YouTube Stats
YouTube has a different story than the articles, it shows less growth from a views perspective. I suspect because a lot of views come on the initial video release.
You’ll notice it dips at the end of the year, which correlates with a large ramp-up in travel, meaning a lot less content, so it makes sense.
Subscriber growth shows a similar story.
Overall I got an additional 7.2k subscribers this year totaling 18.6k subscribers to date, which is awesome, but if I were a little more consistent, I’m thinking that number would be a bit higher.
Numbers reported are from Jan 1 through Dec 28, 2022
Top 2022 YouTube Videos by Views
- 57,414 – How to Add Drag and Drop in React with React Beautiful DnD
- 34,217 – Trigger a Function when Scrolling to an Element in React with Intersection Observer
- 32,650 – Save State to LocalStorage & Persist on Refresh with React.js
- 26,560 – How to Use Framer Motion to Add Animations and Page Transitions to a Next.js React App
- 19,673 – How to use Storybook JS to create a component design system in React
3 of these videos were from 2020 and 2 were from 2022. The 3 were videos posted alongside freecodecamp.org articles, which have an impact on external traffic, but secondary to YouTube search.
Numbers reported are from Jan 1 through Dec 28, 2022
Conferences & Workshops
Conferences ate a lot of my time this year. Between travel, wandering around giving talks, or manning the sponsor booth, I didn’t get much time between to do anything regularly productive.
But being able to travel the world and meet so many amazing people was such an amazing opportunity that I’m fortunate to have.
This year I made it to 3 different countries for talks and another 4 other US states for talks. A few additional ones for events where I just was working the booth.
That said, the totals of each were:
- 13 conference talks
- 3 workshops
I’m hoping to do more workshops next year. While I’ve done a few online before, this was my first in-person, and it was an awesome learning experience.
So far I’m slated to be at CodeMash and RenderATL. Hope to see you there!
Podcasts & Streams
I always have a lot of fun joining podcasts and streams. It’s much more exciting being able to chat with someone and sometimes interact with people watching along whether just hanging out or asking questions.
This year I made it on:
- 6 podcast episodes
- 6 streams
One I want to especially call out was my chat with Ardan Labs, where it was basically a journey through my development career. Really fun going back digging through all of those early chapters!
Libraries & Projects
Every year I publish a ton of different repositories and mini projects, like a Next.js Redirect Manager (DIY shortlinks), but most of these are little fun things or demos for tutorials and don’t provide much impact.
However, this year I published two Cloudinary-related libraries:
While I’m proud of both, I learned a lot through Next Cloudinary and have already seen it make an impact on people’s workflows. Super fun project.
Beyond those (well including), I created and published 80 repositories, including all of those tutorial demos and projects.
I’ve tried this year to start organizing them, archiving when published, and including some templated information including links to the tutorials. Lots of manual work, but helps keep track of things.
Plans for 2023
So what’s in store for 2023?
I’m slowing down travel quite a bit.
I’d like to get more consistent with my content publishing, working with sponsors to offset some of the costs of doing free content that’s not related to my time with Cloudinary.
I’ve always had in the back of my head a new stream series, and maybe with less travel, I’ll have time, but we’ll see. I’ve been having a lot of fun doing code projects, so I expect I’ll be doing more smaller “products”.
I also plan on doing at least one course. Not sure what that’s going to be on yet, but I’m thinking of breaking out of my Next.js shell and doing one of the newer frameworks that are gaining some traction.
What do you want to learn in 2023?
Let me know! Hit me up on Twitter or shoot me an email at hello@colbyfayock.com.
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