My year 2022 in review

Andrej Friesen

Feb 20, 2023 — 4 min read

Wow, it is already February of 2023 and I did not write anything. So let's have a small review of the last year.

Blogging

In the last year, I have written 48 articles.‌‌ I tried to do a weekly newsletter-style post a week but quickly felt that I didn't have to say anything valuable. I did enjoy the process of getting something out but I was not too fond of the quality. Just creating posts for the sake of numbers did not feel right to me. Therefore I ditched the idea and went back to occasional blog posts. Maybe I come back to this later, it is my blog so I can do whatever I like 🙂.

Analytics

This year I got 33500 views and about 23700 unique visitors. The average time spent is almost 2 minutes. And as you can see below the views and visitors increased from under 1000 visitors per month in January to 3000 visitors per month in November and December.

Most of my traffic about 50% is organic traffic from search engines.‌‌I think the (None) part is direct traffic, so people who have bookmarked my site.‌‌That is about 3/4 of my traffic.‌‌‌‌The rest is coming from communities and forums where I or others have posted links to one of my posts.

Work

I am still working fully remotely as a Software and Systems Engineer at gridscale. However, 2022 was also the year I started working part-time.‌‌4 instead of 5 days a week with the 20% payment reduction accordingly to the 20% less working time.‌‌My work-life balance is way better now. I was working on small projects, this blog, learning new things, and simply enjoying my time.‌‌Unfortunately, I could not feel that since mid-September. That is the time when movement plans were set in stone. I hope this changes soon.

Moving

We finally found a place that has way more space (60m² to 130m²), 4 rooms instead of 3, a terrasse, and some land to plant some vegetables. It's not perfect but an improvement in many aspects of space, rooms, and noise. Especially noise.‌‌We pay double the rent in a more or less rural area.‌‌We don't know anyone and it's a really small village with ~3000 people. Let's see how that goes.

Gaming

I pre-ordered the Steam Deck by Valve and was relatively early with the delivery. I bought it for 2 reasons. Gaming on the Go/couch and because I am curious about the Linux system running this device.

Looks like Valve has kicked up a really nice device and sold quite a few of those! Awesome. I am looking forward to the SteamOS release. When this happens I could see my Desktop Gaming PC which runs on Windows to run SteamOS. I really do nothing except gaming with that desktop. However my most played game Hunt: Showdown is not supported yet because of anti-cheat. So we shall see.

I really enjoyed the Steam Deck playing on the go, especially on train rides. But also on vacation, it was a nifty device to spend some time with.

For relaxing I like to read books on my Kindle and listen to podcasts or audiobooks on my phone and now I also get to play games with good stories as well.

One game I exclusively played on the Steam Deck was God of War. Can recommend.‌ Another one I spend some time with is the Witcher 3. I finally was able to get through the story which I enjoyed a lot. However, my most played is Hunt Showdown. Since this is an FPS which I almost exclusively play with a few friends I will most likely always use my PC for this. For now, it is not even possible to run on the Steam Deck anyway.

Media

After moving I decided to give Jellyfin a new try.‌‌Currently, we are going through The Big Bang Theory because I did not watch everything back in the day. Jellyfin on the Nvidia Shield is a good experience so far.

❤️That is it for today!❤️

What posts did you like? What would you like to read more about? Let me know in the comments below and have a great day!