2 years ago, on this day I decided to start my own blog – https://dotnetvibes.wordpress.com and I must admit that it has been an awesome journey with lot of excitement, learning, challenges and acquaintances. Beginning of a New Year is a great time to pause and look back at the accomplishments from last year & plan goals for the upcoming year.

In 2017, I focused more on my Speaking Engagements and was able to present more than 20 times in various conferences, tech events, code camps and user groups. Backing up my talks with blog posts helped me in gaining more knowledge/confidence on a particular topic and also answering questions during my session by providing attendees with detailed resources. You can check out all my speaking engagements here.

Selecting topics for blogging is sometimes challenging. Initially I used to blog about new technologies/announcements & how it could help developers in their day to day work.  Being a Full Stack developer I covered topics from both .NET and SQL side. That gave me more flexibility and a wide range of topics to select from. However finding time after work, amidst busy schedules is not always easy & it did not allow me to dedicate much time for blogging.

During the 2nd half of the year, I shifted my focus a bit and started blogging about my experiences and learnings at work. While working on technical issues, I started to document things and make good notes – which helped me to later turn them into quick blog posts. Nowadays any cool thing I do at work, I make sure to blog about it. As a result, I have the luxury of having a proper documentation in hand available in 1 click – without searching my emails, local documents or ticket details for resolution details. There has been multiple times when my colleagues at work have asked me about a problem – and I have just forwarded them a link to my blog – containing the problem statement and the corresponding resolution. That has been very satisfying and worth the efforts!

As I increased my blogging frequency in 2017, I started to see a gradual climb in my website traffic and more feedback came up from social media and online forums.

I posted 65 articles in 2017 and received above 60,000 views and 42,000 visitors. Considering this was my 2nd year of blogging and the fact that my website traffic increased by 2.5 times as compared to last year makes me feel very happy.

In 2017, I also contributed a number of articles to SQLShack – the community blog created by ApexSQL to share SQL Server knowledge. This helped me get my work in front of a bigger audience and grow my network. I completed 2017 with close to 40,000 views on my SQLShack articles – in fact one of the article I wrote on SQL Server Management Studio Tips and Tricks was the most viewed article in SQLShack during 2017 — 10 SSMS Tips and Tricks to boost your Productivity

What to expect in 2018?

I have enjoyed every bit of this journey during the last 2 years. I look forward to gain knowledge on more diverse topics this year and continue blogging about my learnings and experiences with the same passion.

I would like to Thank all my readers for your likes, comments, constant feedback, retweets across social networking sites. Keep reading and sharing!

Wish you a very Happy New Year and Keep Rocking.

Categories: Conference