Today marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. Time to revisit the first year of what I hope will be a longer-lived blog than my previous attempts (circa 2002 and 2009, respectively).

Favorite articles

I am particularly proud of the following posts:

• Wanderjahre – I announce that I quit my job, and philosophize about craftsmanship.
• Empowering Infrastructure – why it’s great to be a developer these days.
• Wabi-Sabi – on the traditional Japanese aesthetic.
• Party Profile – visualized data from my going-away party.
• Alien Developer’s Guide to Moving to NYC – getting-started tips for apartment hunting, meeting people, work spaces.
• Home – a personal ode to New York.
• Creating Apps on the Beach – insights into my app creation process.

Frequency and word count

Taking the cue from my last infographic’s popularity among friends and fellow nerds, I’ve created another visualization of the past year’s data.

Rhythm and word counts of posts on this blog, over the past year. (Open image in new tab to enlarge.)

The data clearly shows that the frequency of posts has declined notedly in the second half of this blog’s first year.

In part, this is because, by the summer, I fell behind and then eventually dropped the Weekly Picks, my roughly-regular roundup of links to interesting articles or apps. Although the Weekly Picks proved quite popular with my readers, I learned how much dedication it takes to commit to a regular publishing schedule – a commitment that I was not ready to make, and one that I now admire all the more in the bloggers and publishers of weekly or even daily publications who are.¹

Other reasons are the intense past few months – both professionally and personally – since my return from New York to Frankfurt in September, and a tendency of ever-longer posts.

Outlook

I’ll go on record with resolving to publish shorter posts, more often in the second year of my blog. Perhaps something like 2–3 posts a month, and keeping them under a thousand words.

Also, in the next few months I intend to keep up the surprisingly regular rhythm of publishing a new app of my own every few months.

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, as always, say hello@yangmeyer.de or tweet me @yangmeyer.