Gabor self reporting for 2020.11
This is the report for November 2020. (See also the list of previous reports).
Overview
We did not have strict lockdown this month and I managed to go for two hikes and we even went to a restaurant where they give you a basket and you sit in the near-by park. It was really nice and seemed almost normal.
I ran a course (remotely) on Test Automation with Perl. For that I had to update my old training material and add quite a few new slides. It was fun. I wish I had a few more of these. Either in Perl testing on Python testing.
I keep helping the same company - still remotely - to add unit-test to some old Perl code. What can I say. I love it.
Personal blog posts
There were 3 post on my personal site (compared to 1 in the previous month). I probably need to write more.
The number followers is growing and seeing a number of advertised pages with 43 followers these numbers look good, but still far from having a real impact.
I am quite happy with the increase in the number of followers, but I'll have to invest a lot more into sharing content on these pages so a large part of further increase in followers will come from outside my immediate connections.
Number of followers:
English: 516 (+24) Hebrew: 505 (+32) Spanish: 33 (-) Hungarian: 9 (-) Perl: 495 (+52) DevOps: 308 (+25) Python: 291 (+27) Golang: 177 (+20) Personal: 4,089 (+14)
Same as last month, I primarily posted in my two main Twitter accounts.
I keep posting in the Perl programmers group and I like the feedbacks there.
Patreon
Finally I could start offering annual subscription via Patreon. Some of my supporters took the offer and even upgraded their support to a higher tier.
- 2020.11 ended with 69 Patrons and 6 followers
- 2020.10 ended with 66 Patrons and 6 followers
- 2020.09 ended with 63 Patrons and 6 followers
- 2020.08 ended with 54 Patrons and 6 followers.
- 2020.07 ended with 30 Patrons
See a partial list of supporters.
I have posted 17 times in November. An improvement compared to the previous month, but I can do better. I posted a few entries from the Programming Boootcamp for Scientists series and many posts about Perl that are also listed on the Perl Maven site below.
According to my Patreon page there are now 51 videos, 1 writing and 1 link available to the Patrons with $5 or more monthly support.
All the other posts are public.
Dev.to
I volunteered to be the moderator of the perl tag and took a lot more interest in being active on the site. In November I publish 8 posts on dev.to. Two of them got more than 100 views. The one about CPAN Rocks got 109 views an the one Testing is Awesome 368 views and 11 likes.
I am not sure how close are these numbers to the reql view count. Especially as I have an old post from 2017 How to disconnect from Twitter account? that has 16 likes but less than 25 views. It can happen, but that looks really strange.
Perl Maven
On the Perl Maven site there are 14 posts in November (there were 5 in October). You can see them in the archive.
Several of them are screencasts.
Code Maven
On the Code Maven site there are 7 posts in November (there were 13 in October). You can see them in the archive there.
Mostly parts of the course called Programming bootcamp for Scientists.
Perl Weekly
Nothing very exciting on the Perl Weekly newsletter. I edited 2 of the issues and manwar edited 3.
CPAN Digger
I've set up the CPAN Digger web site and also helped a bit with the CPAN Dashboard of Dave Cross. It was really fun to cooperate on something. It is very unfortunate that so far very few people have decided to add themselves to the site. It also sort-of reduced the fun of wanting to work on it.
Anyway, I have contacted a number of CPAN authors based on the CPAN Digger reports. Some of them responded. On the CPAN Digger page I try to keep track of the authors I've contacted in order to include link to their VCS in the META files of their CPAN distributions.
Unfortunately this does not always reflect in the numbers collected weekly as there are some authors who disregard my email. (Or maybe never receive it.)
Based on logs that the CPAN Digger creates but that are currently not on the web site I've also sent many pull-requests to change http links to https links and to make some other minor administrative changes.
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. The number of followers on the various YouTube channels:
English: 2,014 (+17) Hebrew: 96 (+7) Hungarian: 9 (-) Spanish: 6 (-)
Webinars and Meetups
This month I had only one webinar in Hebrew about Continuous Integration (CI) using GitLab Pipelines.
Spanish lessons
I did not take any Spanish lessons via italki and I almost completely stopped learning Spanish with Duolingo. I feel totally stuck with my Spanish on Duolingo. I am supposed to learn various past tenses and it is hard and I don't enjoy it.
I keep listening to podcasts in Spanish and I have also started to watch various YouTube channels that are aimed to native Spanish speakers. Sometimes I even understand them.
Hebrew
I kept improving my typing and spelling skills with Duolingo. Sometime I already feel more confident writing in Hebrew than in English though it is still much slower. (and seeing the huge number of grammatical and typo fixes Dave Cross send to the Perl Weekly probably my confidence in my English writing isn't really justified.
Hiking
This was a mostly flat walk near a huge quarry. It was really nice though unfortunately the first part leads through some construction zone where they are building a new train line and then I went near-by the main road between Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem and because it was on Friday it was still quite busy and noisy.
Once I crossed the main road (there is an underpass) the way back through Gimzo was beautiful. As usual.
The other one was a bit more hilly. I tried to explore some new route in the park near-by.
Sport
According to Runkeeper I went walking 15 times in November. Each time about 5.29 km. (In October it was 18 times.) My Speed is around 6km/h.
TODO
In December I'll spend about 10 days working for long-term contract where I help out with Python programming, Node programming, Java programming. CI (both Jenkins and GitLab), Functional testing in the 3 programming languages. Load testing in Python. Git. SSO.
About 2-3 days with my Perl-training client working writing tests for some old code.
Post a video every day to my Patron subscribers. This will include the videos from the Programming bootcamp for Scientists to the higher tiers and videos analyzing Open source projects to everyone.
I'd like to work on getting more training clients. For this I am going to design a few more courses. I have some ideas creating interesting combinations of my existing courses and adding a few more for which I already have large chunks of the material.
Check if I can upload the whole Programming Bootcamp series to Udemy and sell there.
Work on the Python Flask course. Start recording videos.
Work on the condo-management application to make it usable for at least myself by the end of the month.
I really hope I'll be able to go for a few hikes. That partially depends on the weather and the level of the lockdown we'll have during Hanukkah.
Sport: keep walking every 2nd day or so.
I have to clean up my inbox that is just getting worse and worse. (this seems to be stuck here in the TODO)