Looking Back

It’s really hard for me to believe, but this is my 100th post to TechTrek. I’m really proud of everything that has happened and all of the things that I have learned since my first post on November 5th, 2015. I’m incredibly proud of myself for not once missing a publishing date – I set a goal to always post something on Tuesdays and Fridays and even though I’ve often had a lot of stuff going on (week long vacations, sick, new job, etc), I never missed that goal (except that one time I accidentally posted on Monday instead of Tuesday…). Maintaining that streak was really important to me and I’m so proud of myself for keeping it going. This site has meant a lot to me. It has been an awesome way for me to keep notes on what I’m learning and for motivating me to learn new things and start new projects. It also excites me to think that I have maybe inspired or helped someone else, but that was never the intention nor the goal. With all of that being said, I have decided to no longer strive to maintain my Tuesday/Friday streak. I want to continue to make posts because I know it makes me a better developer, engineer, writer, and so on. However, I no longer feel the burden to have regularly scheduled posts. Hopefully the outcome will be higher quality posts, with me learning more challenging things. The caveat to this is that I know how much this site has helped me. Not wanting to break my posting streak has lead to me learning so many awesome things that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. Therefore, if I find myself no longer continuing to learn and explore data, databases, and programming, I’ll start posting regularly again. This post needed something of substance, so what better way than to do quick stats on TechTrek! Early on, I broke my posts into 6 categories. I tried do only put posts into one category with multiple tags, but some posts felt like they belonged in multiple categories:

  • Personal Projects: 40 posts
  • How To: 31 posts
  • Python: 21 posts
  • Methodology: 18 posts
  • Programming: 16 posts
  • Electronics: 1 post

I’ve tried really hard (and succeeded, thus far) to not use Wordpress’s default Uncategorized category. I felt like the categories I made for myself were what I wanted to stick to - if it was outside of that, it wasn’t worth writing a post. Obviously, I made an exception for today’s post (though, I nearly didn’t!). I had 36 tags. The most popular tags have been:

  • MySQL: 23 posts
  • Python: 22 posts
  • SQLite: 17 posts
  • SQL Server: 12 posts

There are 10 tags with only 1 post (PlayItForwardFundraiser, microcontrollers, c++, Ubuntu, Sheets, ASPNET, matlab, certification, datawarehouse, git). I hope to be posting more about Git and data warehousing soon! My most popular month was August 2016, where I had 1,350 sessions (for 1,154 users). My most popular post was An Introduction To R and my least popular post was Primary Keys (my 2nd ever post). The Gunsmith suite also had very few views, which is a shame because I think that was one of the better projects I’ve done over the last year.

Whats Next?

There are still many things for me to learn. In fact, one of my main goals when I started this was to pass the Microsoft Technology Assistant Database certification test. I haven’t directly studied for this yet, let alone take and pass the exam. I also really hope to finish some of the projects I started. Specifically, the NFL database and the pantry database/app. I hope to learn more about database design methodology and guidelines, and overall how to be a better data engineer and software developer. Some point midway through this blog, I switched the plugin that formats the code segments within the blog. Someday when I’m extraordinarily bored, I hope to go through and fix all of the posts with broken formatting. Finally, a word cloud for all of my posts: figure_1 If you have any suggestions on future posts you’d like to see, projects I should work on, or things I should look up, please let me know! So, for the 100th time: H__ave questions or suggestions? Please feel free to comment below or contact me.