Gabor self reporting for 2021.01

This is the report for January 2021. (See also the list of previous reports).

Overview

There are already 10 courses listed in my Teachable-based school. Not all of the are fully recorded, but during January I made a lot of progress in uploading existing videos and recording even more videos.

I am quite encouraged by this. See my plans for February at the bottom of this page.

Courses

There are 4 Perl courses, 3 Python courses, a Go course, a Git course and a Docker course on the Code Maven courses site.

There is a possibility for a monthly subscription fee, but users can also buy the courses and they will get all the updates when they are done.

  • Web Development with Perl Dancer - it is ready though when time permits I am planning to add more videos to it. It was done in December.
  • Testing in Perl - roughly 60% of what I planned has been recorded.
  • Parallel Processing in Perl - I'd say it is ready, but since then new ideas came up so I'll probably extend this one as well.
  • Perl Tk - I recorded these videos a few months earlier. I'll have to decide if I would like to round this to a course or keep it as a nice to have.
  • Python Programming bootcamp - This was recorded in September-October last year. It is ready.
  • Functional programming in Python - more need to be added to this.
  • Python Testing Quick Introduction - this is a short course that was fully recorded.
  • Programming Go - I recorded the beginning of it, but it waits for a lot more content. The first 4 videos were recorded months ago. Then someone wanted to view them so I uploaded to the courses and recorded many more episodes. Then the person disappeared so for now it is less urgent to record.
  • Docker - A nice intro - I still have plans to extend it. Recorded a few months ago.
  • Git - This was recorded several months ago and it only contains an intro on MS Windows. More to follow.

As I went over the list now I need to update these courses to finish more of them before I go on starting new ones. However I also got some interests about other Perl courses so I might start recording those as well. For some people, especially those who buy any of the bundles or the monthly subscription service, it will be better to receive at least some of the videos from a course than to wait till I finish recording all the others.

Personal blog posts

There were 9 posts on my personal site. Much better than in the previous month. I keep spending time contemplating on what should I do to make progress with my online business.

LinkedIn

Under the analytics link on each page there is a way to export the data from LinkedIn. I'll take a look at that next month.

For now, I think I was a lot more active on both the Perl and the Python page this month.

The growth on the Perl Maven page was much bigger than I expected and on the Python page too I almost managed to reach the goal I set a month ago. I actually thought that the growth of the Perl page will slow down, but that's not what happened.

I think the polls on both the Perl and the Python pages helped the growth.

I am quite happy with the increase in the number of followers.

Number of followers:

Hebrew: 570 (+28) English: 536 (+10) Spanish: 32 (-1) Hungarian: 10 (-)

Perl: 688 (+119) Python: 515 (+129) DevOps: 339 (+16) Golang: 200 (+10)

Personal: 4,157 (+43)

During the month I noticed that LinkedIn has changed the "Invite connection" window. It got worse. Though you can do some filtering it also shows all the people you have already invited which seems to be quite unnecessary and just makes it more difficult to find the people I would like to invite.

After collecting the numbers above but before publishing this report I already sent out the February invitation to 100 people in the USA to follow the Perl Maven page. I also invited 250 people in Israel to follow the Python Maven page. This time, however, I did not look up people who listed Perl or Python on their profile so I might have invited a lot of people for whom the subject is not that relevant. (And after inviting the first batch of people from Israel I realized I should have invite the Israelis to the Hebrew page first and I could use my Python credits to invite people from other countries. Well, I guess next month I might do that.

Twitter

Same as last month, I primarily posted in my two main Twitter accounts.

Facebook

I started to post on the Perl Maven page and then sharing the posts on the Perl programmers group. I also set up a Python Maven page and tried to share my posts to the Python group. Sometimes my post gets approved and then sometimes it gets some likes and comments.

I also accepted the friend requests of all the people who sent me and I also sent a lot of friend-requests to all the people Facebook suggested me. Then I invited all of them to both the Perl Maven and Python Maven pages. Many have accepted the invitation.

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.

  • 2021.01 ended with 68 Patrons and 8 followers
  • 2020.12 ended with 66 Patrons and 8 followers
  • 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 31 times in January enough for one post a day. I finished posting the Perl Dancer series and started posting the Functional Programming in Python series.

According to my Patreon page there are now 104 videos, 1 writing and 2 links available to the Patrons with $5 or more monthly support.

All the other posts are public.

Dev.to

I was not at all active on dev.to in December

Perl Maven

On the Perl Maven site there are only 3 posts in January (34 in December, 14 in November, 5 in October). The number is so low because I have not posted the new videos. Not even for the Pro members. I guess I'll need to fix this soon. I have started to direct the people interested in the "Pro" videos to the courses.

You can see them in the archive.

Code Maven

On the Code Maven site there are 12 posts in January (2 December, 7 November, 13 in October). Most of them posted on 30 January for the Pro members.

You can see them in the archive there.

Perl Weekly

Nothing very exciting on the Perl Weekly newsletter. I edited 2 of the issues and manwar edited 2.

CPAN Digger

I have not done anything regarding the CPAN Digger in January. See the stats.

YouTube

My uploads slowed down. The number of followers on the various YouTube channels:

English: 2,062 (+16) Hebrew: 133 (+20) Hungarian: 9 (-) Spanish: 6 (-)

Webinars and Meetups

This month I had 3 webinars in Hebrew. One about Async programming in Python and the other two were the beginning of the Pytest course.

For next month I've scheduled 3 again. One about Decorators Python and two about testing in Python.

Spanish lessons

I keep learning Spanish with Duolingo. The various past tenses still make a lot of trouble.

I had a few Spanish lessons via italki.

I keep listening to podcasts in Spanish and I watched a few YouTube channels that are aimed to native Spanish speakers.

Hebrew

I kept improving my typing and spelling skills with Duolingo. I feel more and more confident writing even to real people.

Hiking

There was no hiking this month. Both because of the coldish weather and the lockdown.

COVID 19

My daughter was home for 2.5 weeks. Most of the time she was locked in her room as she was exposed to a COVID-19 positive person. She had 3 checks. All came back negative. So we let her out.

I got both shots using the Pfizer vaccine so now I am fully vaccinated. I still plan to keep my distance and keep wearing mask all the time when around other people as this "only" reduces the chances, does not eliminate them and it is unclear what's going on with transmission.

Sport

According to Runkeeper I went walking 17 times in January. Each time about 5.29 km.

TODO

In February I'll spend again about 10 days working for long-term contract.

I don't know yet, but I might have 2 or 3 days with my Perl-training client writing tests for some old code and writing some new code. That task will probably also lead to a few blog posts or slides in my Perl courses.

Post a video every day to my Patron subscribers. This will include the videos from the courses and some public videos.

At least 5 videos publicly to the English YouTube channel.

At least 10 public videos on the Hebrew YouTube channel. These are the Webinar recording and republishing some of the already recorded videos.

I should probably run a new poll on both the Perl Maven and Python Maven LinkedIn page. Maybe also on the Facebook pages.

I don't have a specific goal here, but I need to record tons of parts of my existing courses and probably also start a few new courses.

I don't know how realistic this is, but I would like to reach 650 followers on the Code Maven Python LinkedIn page and 780 followers on the Perl Maven LinkedIn page. For that I'll need to share a lot more content on both of those pages. I am thinking about posting quizzes.

I really hope I'll be able to go for a few hikes. That partially depends on the weather and if the lockdown will be released. Hike: 1-2 times, depending when the closure is lifted.

Sport: keep walking every 2nd day or so.

I made nice progress, but I have to further clean up my inbox.