Year in Review

I was inspired by my HashiCorp Ambassador friend Ned to write a “year in review” post to summarize what has been going on this year.

This post will not be as thorough as Ned’s post, but next year I’ll plan ahead for writing one of these posts - this one was very spontaneous, very last-minute!

My blog

#

My blog (the one you are currently reading) has received about 34,000 unique visitors this year. That is more than twice the number of visitors I had during 2023. Many of these visitors have come through HashiBits (the HashiCorp newsletter) and Terraform Weekly. The amount of visitors coming from Google searches have also been steadily increasing.

I did a major redesign of my blog this year, since the Hugo theme I was using was no longer maintained. I spent a few weeks building my own theme before I decided other people are much better on this than I am, so I discovered a theme named Blowfish that I am currently using. I am very happy with it so far.

All in all I wrote about 25 new blog posts this year, which is not terribly much but I am happy with the number. The top three performing posts written this year are:

Another big achievement with my personal blog this year was that I made my first $3! I have a “buy me a coffee” button in the lower right corner of the blog, and I was happily surprised when someone used it¹!

Freelance blogging

#

I was contacted out of the blue by Spacelift who asked me if I wanted to contribute to their blog. Writing for a different target than my own blog has been a great experience! Having people perform technical review of my writing is educational and I’ve learned a lot from this.

During the year I’ve written the following posts for Spacelift:

I’ve also started a few other freelance gigs closer to the end of the year, but more on that in 2025!

Book

#

I published my first ever book this year, Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional Study Guide (AWS edition).

I enjoyed writing a book, and I believe it turned out really well. I have made a few updates since the initial release, and there is one big update on the way concerning formatting.

The plan is to release a printed edition of the book in 2025 (there will also be an Azure edition of the book coming out in 2025).

Public speaking

#

Prior to this year I had done zero public speaking outside of the confines of my day-to-day job. Thus, for me the biggest achievement this year was having my suggested talk for HashiConf accepted and then actually delivering the talk in Boston in October. The talk is available on YouTube:

Apart from HashiConf I also had two prerecorded sessions at two different HashiTalks during the first half of the year:

HashiCorp User Group

#

I started a HashiCorp User Group in Gothenburg this year and we’ve had a total of three sessions. I’ve spoken at all three sessions (along with a few other speakers). I’ve been hoping to get a lot of suggestions from willing speakers, but so far this has been an uphill battle. I hope this will change at some point - but until then I will keep speaking!

Other

#

A fun and different experience (for me) was to be on Ned’s show on YouTube:

Oh, and this was my second year as an HashiCorp Ambassador! I really like this group of people and I hope to be renewed for my third year during 2025.

What could have gone better this year?

#

A few things could have gone better:

• I submitted talks to other conferences, but none got accepted. This makes me think that I need to make my talks more generic, and not too HashiCorp-heavy. HashiCorp stuff are appreciated at HashiCorp conferences, but might not be as popular outside of those. For next year I’ll try to factor this into any proposals I send to other conferences.
• I had a plan to start publishing videos on YouTube, primarily covering Terraform stuff. I never got to it. There are already a lot of great content out there, so it feels like an uphill battle to get something started. However, I still want to do it - perhaps 2025 will be the year?
• I’ve not worked professionally with HashiCorp stuff this year. Not one bit. This feels like a huge disadvantage. (spoiler alert) This will change during 2025 though (/spoiler alert).
• As hinted above, I hope to get more speakers at my HashiCorp User Group sessions. I do enjoy speaking at these sessions myself, but it would be even more fun if other people wanted to speak as well.
• I’ve not really cracked how LinkedIn works yet. My two most popular posts on LinkedIn this year concerned a simple Linux command and a tribute to Mark Tinderholt’s book on Terraform. Not that those posts were not good, but I spent less than 2 minutes on them. Whenever I try to make a thoughtful post I can end up with 3 likes. LinkedIn is a mystery.