As I did in 2013, I wanted to write a quick year end review to look back on what Level up Lunch is becoming.
My personal objective of level up lunch in 2014 was to use it as a catalyst to learn and explore new technologies with a secondary goal of improving my writing skills. I always disliked writing and recall my my mom and brother helping me write papers in high school and in college my then girlfriend, now wife (maybe that is why I married her :)). I recently read a post on why software engineers should write where many of the themes resonate with me such as:
- ability to think clearly
- writer’s draft is the engineer’s prototype
- “impact” to make a difference in people’s lives
- clarify your opinion on a topic and strengthen– or even weaken– your beliefs
- collaboration
The one thing I would add is the natural "high" when publishing and delivering content. Just like when you been banging the keyboard for days and all of sudden it comes together into something you built and can see! If the work on LUL in 2014 inspired some, provide answers to others and improved my writing then I would chalk up to this year being successful.
So what did we learn (accomplish this year):
- Update many java examples to use java 8
- Experimented with setting up amazon cloudfront CDN
- Gain much respect for screencast, the time it takes and value it provides with lots to learn
- Switched lul to build process to use gruntjs for more control to environments
- Site went under a theme change removing bootstrap which boosted page performance scores
- LUL style guide created
- Started groovy examples
- Built a process to create popular pages (coming in 2015)
- Continue to learn about website microdata
Statistics
Site
- Sessions - 335k
- Users - 28k
- Pageviews - 462k
- Average visit duration - 1:07
Social following
- Twitter - 20 followers
- Facebook - 33 likes
- Youtube - 101 subscribers
Top 5 pages
- Audio to text converter with 22k watches on youtube.
- Posting JSON to a REST tutorial
- Converting jsonarray to arraylist
- Spring boot tutorial
- Configure filters in spring boot
Page/Post count
- Posts - 30 (39 total)
- Java exercises - 19 (80 total)
- Java examples - 143 (346 total)
- Java tutorials - 20
- Groovy examples - 48
2015 High Level Goals
- Since I work on LUL part time I need to continue to find the balance between work and home life so burnout doesn't set in.
- Screencast videos take on an average of 3 - 5 hours to produce so I want to evaluate if they provide value and decide whether or not to continue them.
- Create thumbnails and intro for screencasts.
- Have fun!
If you have suggestions on content or improvements drop me a line on twitter @jstnm. Thanks to all of those who have helped me make progress, looking forward to 2015!