Results of 2024 for me and the blog en ru

Let me share what I was up to in 2024, how my plans for the outgoing year [ru] turned out, and what I plan for the year ahead.

Blog

At the beginning of the year, I moved the blog to a custom engine [ru], and I'm very happy with it. Of course, the engine sources are open. Post sources are open too and are comfortably hosted on GitHub. When I want to make a post, I create a branch and start writing.

The blog has become multilingual, with cool tag navigation, controlled suggestions for related posts, and clear SEO. There is still room for improvement, but nothing urgent. I am particularly proud that I managed to implement all of this in about a month, if not faster.

Thanks to multilingual support, I’ve started writing posts in both Russian and English (except for a few that didn’t make sense to translate). For now, I write in Russian first and then translate a post into English. Maybe in the future, I will switch the order.

It turned out that my Russian is quite difficult to translate idiomatically. I try keeping the language simple, but sayings and unique phrases still slip in. Sentence structure (and therefore the flow of thoughts) doesn’t transfer smoothly from Russian to English either. So, even though I've learned to write Russian posts faster, it still takes just as long to complete a post as before — 2-3 days.

Along with migrating to the new engine, I moved the blog to a new analytics system — Plausible. It requires a monthly subscription but it doesn't leak data to corporations and anonymizes everything it can. Also, it allows self-hosting as an option. So far, I'm happy with it.

Blog statistics

I wrote 35 posts in the year — twice as many as the previous one. I'm on another sabbatical, so it's understandable.

Due to the migration to the new analytics system, comparing traffic between 2023 and 2024 is hard.

Here's how it looks:

• The number of unique visitors per month from March to December doubled and exceeded 14k for the entire year. Hooray!
• Visitors to the English version made up a quarter of the Russian one, which is about 20% of the total.
• Visits from Google hovered around 500 per month.

The English version of the blog started with zero posts, so I think the results are pretty good. To be fair, I do occasionally promote the English posts (mostly on Reddit), while I don't promote the Russian ones (I'm not sure where it would make sense to do so; tried posting on Habr a couple of times, but the results weren’t great).

The number of subscribers in the Russian Telegram grew by 1.6 times and now stands at 93 people. The Russian Discord has 12 members. Unfortunately, the English Telegram and English Discord are still empty — I'll need to figure out what to do about that.

Top new posts for 2024

Top posts of 2024 overall

The English tops are similar, as I only translated one old post this year — and it’s leading in the overall top.

Special marketing and SEO achievements:

• The post about Slay The Princess unexpectedly rose in Google search results and leads gamers to the blog. I'm not sure if they stay, but they read it for a while.
• A purely technical post about migrating from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4.0 somehow still draws interest, even though GPT-3.5 is hardly around anymore.
• The post about a tricky SQL optimization made it into the PyCoders newsletter. Well, I helped it get there :-)
• Analytics tracked 7 visits from AI services like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

The top 10 countries by unique visitors

Germany is so high because I'm the most active reader of this blog :-D

Progress on plans

Regarding the plans from last year’s review [ru].

Finish moving to Germany.

Done, this month I'm getting my resident permit in plastic.

Resolve the majority of (accumulated) everyday issues.

My wife and I tackled them together. We got settled, and hopefully, we won’t have to move again for at least two years.

Finish the Product Vision Masters training on a good note.

I finished with a final presentation [ru], business plan, and technical prototype.

For now, all activities are on hold — the entire group of students is waiting while Mad Crusaders looks for funding and sorts out legal issues.

By the way, I recommend the lectures from the second World Builders year/class. Yarr Rash has done a lot of work to formalize and compress the materials from the last year — the lectures became more structured, understandable, and shorter. While last year’s lectures had more of an impromptu format, this year, they actually feel like proper lectures.

Try to promote Feeds Fun. Based on the results, decide on the project’s future.

Didn't have time last year, moving it to this one.

News feeds and tagging turned out to be much more complex than they appear at first glance. Feeds Fun is actively evolving, but it’s still far from user-friendly.

Take a break/catch my breath.

I rested a bit, but sometimes I doubt it. :-)

Return to reading and reviewing books.

Done.

In 2024, I wrote 5 reviews:

• Economics: the user's guide
• The Net and the Butterfly
• Piranesi
• The Signal and the Noise
• Harry Potter

Besides that, I read 5 good books on management and related topics, but I decided not to review them separately, as it would easily take up to a month (considering my writing speed and my dislike for some management practices). Instead, I plan to write one big post reviewing all the books once I finish the entire list.

Before looking for a job, try to launch at least one of my projects. Options: Feeds Fun, something from the Product Vision Masters, "The Tale 2.0", or something else.

In progress, postponed to this year.

Migrate the blog to a new engine.

Done.

Start fixing my English.

I started, but in a very basic way — using Duolingo, blogging in English, and reading English fiction and technical books. What I need most is to practice speaking, so I’m pushing this to next year.

Start writing posts in English or translating existing ones.

Started writing, but didn’t have time to translate. :-( Therefore, plans on translations are moved to this year.

Find a job if my projects don’t work out.

I have some progress in my projects, so no job search yet. Postponed to this year.

Develop my exocortex by transitioning to personal instances of open-source software alternatives.

Aside from the blog, I haven’t migrated anything else. There’s just no time. For now, this activity is on hold.

Fill the gaps in my management theory.

In the process, the reading plan is 50% complete. Moving to this year.

Outside of the yearly plans

Some things weren’t planned but happened.

Stopped "The Tale"

It had been a long time coming, but I just couldn’t find time for it. By fall, "The Tale" had gotten to the point where operating it cost more than it was worth.

The game lore [ru] is now open for anyone to use.

Returned to reading fiction

An unexpected and pleasant result for me.

I used to love reading fiction, but adult life after university took over, and I lost the time for it, with rare exceptions.

I got back into reading by combining it with improving my English. Now, I’m diving into English-language literature, something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.

It turns out that reading in the evenings is a good replacement for games and TV shows. I thought it would require more brainpower, but no.

One fun discovery from last year: Susanna Clarke’s vocabulary in Piranesi seemed more familiar to me than J.K. Rowling’s in Harry Potter.

For 2025, I’ve already ordered Terry Pratchett’s Witches series, and it should arrive soon. If I like it, I’ll dive into the entire Discworld series. :-D

Open source

I released:

• Brigid — this blog engine.
• Changy — a changelog manager for people.
• Lore of The Tale game.

Plans for the next year

1. Decide the future of Feeds Fun: business or hobby. Promote it, gather feedback, fix issues, promote again, repeat the cycle a few times, and then make a decision.

2. Make an MVP of the game I outlined during the World Builders classes.

   I like how the mechanics shape up and want to push the experiment to a logical conclusion.

   With the MVP, I also want to explore two things I’ve been meaning to try for a long time:

   • Godot as an game engine for indie games.
   • Rust as a language for implementing complex logic. In my case, it will be pure game logic, where I hope to take advantage of Rust’s paranoid safety. If Rust doesn’t work out, I’ll give Zig a try.

3. Decide whether there will be any financial collaboration with Mad Crusaders or not.

4. If the partnership with Mad Crusaders continues, start making a game with them based on MVP.

5. If I stop working with Mad Crusaders, AND the MVP is playable, AND I have the time, I’ll release the game on Steam as an indie project by a solo developer.

6. Start systematically practicing spoken English.

7. Learn 1000 new English words. Fiction literature should help there.

   Not that I have a poor vocabulary, but Harry Potter showed that I have some unexpected gaps in everyday vocabulary :-)

8. Translate the top 10 Russian blog posts into English.

9. Finish improving my management theory.

   • Finish reading books.
   • Form my vision of project management.
   • Prepare arguments for my vision.

10. Quit drinking cola without getting hooked on an alternative source of caffeine.

    Quite an unexpected point. My wife and I calculated that I spent almost €1000 on cola in half a year. I mostly drank caffeine-free cola, but it’s still not healthy.

11. Start looking for a job if my projects don’t work out.