Gabor self reporting for 2020.08

I've collected the list of previous reports.

Two weeks ago I wrote about activity vs. impact. Let's see how much can I reflect both in this report.

Why do you write monthly reports?

I'd like to show my supporters what I accomplished thanks to their support, and I hope others will decide and show they value my work via Patreon.

It is very easy for me to feel that a month passed an I have not done anything. So looking back, collecting the data helps moving forward.

Looking at it day-by-day it is very hard to see if my work has a positive impact. e.g. Sometimes for days no one follows my LinkedIn pages. Then a day comes and suddenly many new followers. Looking at it from the perspective of a month, helps to see the steady growth. That encourages me.

Personal blog posts

7 posts on my personal site. (compared to 17 in the previous month.) I also have a number of drafts, but they are just WIP (Work In Process) that already got some investment, but have not generated any value to my readers. Actually, in this case, writing down my thoughts already create value to me, and I am not really sure how much value my posts on this site really create to others. So maybe it isn't that bad that I have kept them as drafts.

I kept posting on the LinkedIn pages, but I had a lot less energy and I posted less frequently than earlier. Especially in the second half of the month.

I also spent some time inviting more of my connections to the new pages. As LinkedIn does not provide better tools, what I do is I open LinkedIn in two browsers. In one of them I visit my LinkedIn page and click on the "invite contacts" link. In the other one I search for people with the appropriate keyword who are my immediate contacts. I also filter it to countries as otherwise the lists would be too big. Then I copy-paste the names one by one to the invitation window.

It is not something that needs a lot of brain-cells, so I do it when I am too tired to do anything more complex.

I ran two polls. The one on the Perl Maven page went quite well. The poll got 87 votes. 40% are interested in Web development, 32% in testing, 16% in OOP, and 11% in other.

The one on the Python page was a lot less successful. This poll only got 11 votes and they were almost evenly distributed among Web development, Testings, and General Python programming.

Number of followers:


  English: 412 (+18)
  Hebrew:  377 (+35)
  Spanish:  31 (-)
  Hungarian: 8 (-)

  Perl:   306 (+106)
  DevOps: 172 (+50)
  Python: 139 (+47)
  Golang:  96 (+28)

  Personal: 4,032

Twitter

After the initial enthusiasm, this month I primarily posted in my two main Twitter accounts.

Facebook

My plan was to create pages in Facebook similar to what I have in LinkedIn, but I hardly did anything. However I ran a poll in the two Perl-related groups and got a few answers.

Patreon

Last month I ended with 30 Patrons (6 were new).
This month I ended with 54 Patrons (24 were new) and 6 followers.

I am humbled by all the support, but it also addictive. I want more.

Most of the patrons joined in the first part of the month and I think most of them were readers of the Perl Weekly newsletter with a much smaller number from the Perl Maven newsletter and site and from other locations.

I have posted 29 times in August. Almost daily. Primarily I was posting a series about Docker. It still has a long way to go. I also had a few posts about Git and a few videos about Perl.

According to my Patreon page there are now 24 videos, 1 writing and 1 link available to the Patrons with $5 or more monthly support.

The other posts were public.

Unfortunately Patreon does not have a very easy way to see what was published, when, and to whom.

On first of August I changed the way my Patreon account is charging. It is now up-front, so when people pledge their support they immediately pay. This has its own issues as this means that if someone signs up on the 30th, that person will be charged on the 30th and then on the 1st of next month too. I raised the issue on the Patreon community forum, but apparently this has been discussed many times and Patreon has not provided a solution.

Patreon does not allow to change it back, but it is also a requirement to enable annual payments once and if my account will be eligible for that.

I also participated in a course ran by Patreon to help its creators. I got a few ideas on what to do, for example to run a survey to ask my supporters. I have not done that yet, but I ran a few polls elsewhere.

Perl Maven

On the Perl Maven site there are 9 posts in August, the same as in July, as you can see in the archive

2 of them are screencasts. I'd like to do more of these Perl-related screencasts. Maybe once a week.

Code Maven

On the Code Maven site there are 29 posts in August as you can see in the archive there.

I started with the recordings of a Go course, but then I got an opportunity and started to record my course called Programming bootcamp for Scientists. That's the bulk of the content. So far about 13 hours recorded in 18 parts.

I've also recorded a few episodes in the Docker course that I also posted to my Patreon supporters.

There were also 2 post about Raku.

I also have 4 posts on the Hebrew version of the Code Maven site.

Perl Weekly

Nothing very exciting on the Perl Weekly newsletter. I edited three of the issues and manwar edited two.

There is a new section at the top of each issues of the newsletter showing some stats from MetaCPAN.

CPAN Digger

I started to work (again) on an idea I called CPAN Digger a while ago. The idea has several layers. I think I'll write about this in a separate blog post.

In any case, while working on this I contacted several CPAN authors asking them to include the link to their VCS in their META files and also sent pull-requests to several CPAN authors to have Travis-CI working on their project. Maybe I should start with a ticket asking if they would be interested in Travis-CI or GitHub Actions, if they are using Github.

YouTube

I uploaded a number of videos, but they are all also published as pages on my other sites, so I should probably not count them here. I can publish the number of followers on the various YouTube channels though.


  English:   1,920 (+25)
  Hebrew:       77 (+6)
  Hungarian:     9 (-)
  Spanish:       4 (-)

Webinars and Meetups

In August I had no webinars and only a single Meetup. I wonder why do I then pay Zoom for it. I am going to have a few in September.

The Meetup was in my Israeli group and was given in Hebrew. It was about introducing Travis-CI to have cloud-based Continuous Integration. I thought that this will be the first part of a series, but only a 6 people attended so I am not sure.

Spanish lessons

I keep taking my Spanish lessons via italki and keep learning a bit with Duolingo as well.

Hebrew

Though my spoken Hebrew is fluent, I hardly spent time reading and writing in Hebrew so I am very slow in both. I am now using the Hebrew lessons of Duolingo to practice a bit. I eliminate the sound, so I won't go based on the voice and make myself actually read the sentences. Some of them are really strange.

Korean

It was a good game, but I gave up learning Korean. Way too difficult and currently I don't have the motivation for it. We'll see.

Home improvement

I bought a new router. I hope the wifi of this one is going to be more stable and we won't need to restart it several times every day.

Hiking

I love being out in the nature, I even have a Meetup group for like minded people, but since the pandemic started I have not organized any hike group and I hardly went on one by myself. This month was much better. I also started to more actively record my hikes and take pictures during the hikes.

For example

Now I can see I can easily edit the title of the pages and add text to them. I might do that as it is fun and it might help some other hiker who is interested finding some place to relax.

TODO

I'll need to learn how to create the nice graphs Manwar has in his monthly report.

It would be nice to automate some of the data collection for this report. I could record the process and publish as new posts.

I would like to publish at least one video a week.

Conclusion

It took me about 2 hours to write this report, but it included collecting some data and writing some of the other reports. There are still plenty of things I could automate in the data collection.