2017: Year in Review

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A little over a year ago I read a great book by John Sonmez: Soft Skills, you can read a review of it here. To put it simply, if I haven't read that book, I would never have started this blog.A little over a year ago I read a great book by John Sonmez: Soft Skills, you can read a review of it here. To put it simply, if I haven’t read that book, I would never have started this blog.

A Year of Writing

Here we are, one year later. Week after week I would prepare an article and write it for you guys. I have a 9 – 5 job, and I have to say, it was quite a challenge to write one article per week. It takes anywhere from 4 to 20 hours for me to prepare an article. For example, book reviews would take around 4 hours (reading the book doesn’t really count πŸ™‚ ). Articles that involve full project examples and are over 2k words can take up to 20 hours to finish. I found that having at least one article in the buffer helps to alleviate the pressure a bit.

I found writing to be a bit difficult at first, but with time and practice I actually enjoy it quite a lot. I’m still a bit nervous that I’ll write something stupid and you guys will grill me πŸ˜€

Friends

Keeping up a schedule of publishing once a week was extremely challenging, and I couldn’t have done it without my friends who helped me out by writing guest articles:

The guys wrote great articles for you, and helped me a lot as well. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their hard work and excellent articles. Thanks guys, you’re awesome πŸ™‚

A special thanks goes to Ana who designed the site/app logo. She’s an awesome iOS developer with some design skills, thanks Ana πŸ™‚

Some of you approached me inquiring about writing for the blog. You’re more than welcome to write, the more the merrier. If you’re interested, you can easily contact me using the contact me form or by reaching out on social networks.

You Guys

Writing a blog would make little sense if there’s no one to read it. I’ve seen the number of visits go from a few dozen to a few thousand. And I have you guys to thank for that.

Thanks a lot for reading the blog!

Without you and your views, likes, shares… I wouldn’t have the motivation to write. It really means a lot when someone reaches out and thanks me for writing something that helped them in their development.

Networking

If you want to be the first to get the latest article, subscribing via email is still your best option. Obviously, I publish new articles on social networks, most notably:

Feel free to reach out and connect, like, share…

During the year I built a small app that accompanies this blog, you can also read all the articles from within the app as well.

Top Articles

It’s been a colourful year and there were all kinds of articles on the blog, here are the top articles that you guys loved:

  1. Understanding Operation and OperationQueue in Swift
  2. Memory Management in Swift: The Strong, The Weak and The Unowned
  3. Structures vs Classes in Swift
  4. Using Dependency Injection
  5. Sending Data From Your App to Apple Watch Using WCSession

There’s one article that got published recently and is sky rocketing –Β Design Patterns in Swift: Abstract Factory. In a year of writing, I’ve never seen an article get so many hits in such short time. I gather, you guys must really be interested in design patterns, so you can expect a few more articles on the subject.

What Next

Definitely keep on writing πŸ™‚ The number of articles on the blog is around 60 and I personally find it a bit disorganised. The categories menu that’s already on the blog will need to be re done and moved to the top of the page, just to make it neat and tidy.

I hope to see some of you guys writing articles on the blog, so we can publish two articles per week. I was thinking of having something like a suggestion box where you guys can suggest new topics or features for the blog.

!Conclusion

No conclusion today πŸ™‚ With the year ahead of us, we all have a lot of plans so let’s get busy. I wish you guys all the best in the New Year and I hope you get to strike a few items off your bucket list. Once more, thanks a lot for reading the blog, I really appreciate it.

If you want to reach out, just drop me a note, I’m always happy to chat and help.

Can’t finish an article without… Have a nice day πŸ™‚

Dejan.

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