Looking back at my 2022

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

The blog 💪

This year has been great for my blog. I have written 24 articles and I have started doing weekly posts, which is something I am looking to keep up in the new year.

Through writing, I am starting to build a knowledge database for myself and others. It is a great feeling when I need to search for information and end up referring to an article on my blog. This, and the fact that writing and sharing my thoughts with people helps me learn and properly understand a topic, are the main reasons I write articles.

I collect analytics on my blog in a privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant way using Fathom. These analytics help me understand each articles performance so that I can learn from them and improve my content curation and writing style.

I was going through the data from this year and found that these were the most read articles:

An early look at Swift extensible build tools: This was the best performing article I have ever written. Before Swift extensible build tools came out, I decided to download a development snapshot of Swift and try it out. The article got featured by Dave Verwer in iOS Dev Weekly and by Antoine van der Lee in SwiftLee Weekly, which really helped to expand its reach.

Something that makes me very proud of this article is that if you google ‘Swift Extensible Build Tools’, my article comes up as the first result! 🤩

Embedding a dylib in a Swift Package: This article, which is also Swift Package related, did really well this year. I decided to write about something I had recently done at work for my future self: how to embed a xcframework in a Swift Package. This article also got shared in iOS Dev Weekly and was my first feature in Adam Rush’s SwiftlyRush newsletter.
Binary targets in modern Swift packages: This article provided a thorough guide on the state of binary targets in Swift Packages in 2022, and was the best performing article that wasn’t featured in a newsletter.

How do people find my blog?

I wanted to look back and reflect on how people were actually finding my blog. To do this, I used Fathom again and looked at the list of top referrers:

A list of the top referrers for polpiella.dev

Unsurprisingly, newsletters are always an amazing boost to the reach of my articles. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google was the top referrer though, as I have been doing a lot of work to improve the keywords used and increase discoverability.

I want to take this chance to thank every one who has shared my articles this year, it really helps keep me going and people have given me some amazing feedback ❤️.

A new role

In September this year I got the chance to apply for an internal promotion. At the BBC, the typical process for promotion is to apply for an open position within your team or in another team within the company. I was lucky enough to be told by my boss that there was a vacant role in my team after one of my colleagues left so I decided to go for it, do the interview process and, fortunately, I was successful in my application!

From September this year, I became a Senior Software Engineer and met one of my goals for the year 🎉

I have wanted to start an email newsletter to share content from the iOS community for a long time. It wasn’t until October this year, and thanks to Tunde’s encouragement, that I left my fears and self-doubts behind and started the iOS CI Newsletter.

I am so happy I did!!! It gets sent out every two weeks with news about iOS CI/CD and I really enjoy putting it together. I also wanted to take this chance to thank everyone who has subscribed: it already has over 300 subscribers after just 5 issues 🤯. You can access all previous issues in the newsletter home page if you have missed them.

Public Speaking

I wanted to put a lot of focus on improving my public speaking skills this year by putting myself out there and getting more experience speaking at conferences and meet ups. I am very grateful to have been given the opportunity to speak at the following events this year, both remotely and in person:

NSManchester.
Do iOS - This was my first time ever speaking at an in-person conference.
Mobile Devops Summit by Bitrise.
Arc.dev Remote LatAm Job Fair.

I met lots of wonderful people and my talks were very well received!

My first interview

Giving my first interview is definitely up there as one of this year’s highlights. I saw a tweet from Jeroen (AppForce1), who gave me a chance to speak at Do iOS in Amsterdam, asking for people who would like to be on his podcast.

Being a long-time fan and listener of the podcast myself I didn’t hesitate and replied saying that I wanted to be involved. He kindly invited me along and we had an awesome chat.

Goals for 2023

Enough looking back to what I did this year and let me tell you where I want to go from here and what to expect from me in the new year:

Weekly articles in the blog.
Speaking at a minimum of 5 conferences or events.
Find a sponsor for my blog or for the iOS CI Newsletter. If you’re reading this and would be interested in helping me keep creating content for free, hit me up! 😜
Grow my Twitter to 1k followers.
Release at least one monetisable product.
Grow the iOS CI Newsletter to a minimum of 500 subscribers.

I will start working on these goals in the new year but now it is time to relax, enjoy being back home and make the most of the time I am spending with my family and friends. Before I go, I want to wish you a Merry Belated Christmas and a Happy New Year! See you in 2023 👋