It is the first day of 2023. Before we move forward, we’ll do a 2022 recap and see how things went compared to 2021. We look at what went well, what can be improved, and maybe even find some action items. Many social media and streaming services provide year-end recaps to their users. We’ll join in the fun. Let’s take a look at the recap!

Looking Back to 2022

The quantity of videos and blog posts published in 2022 were both down compared to 2021, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. The two main video series published in 2022, Getting Started with Rails 7 and NerdDice.com have both been performing very well from a likes and views standpoint since their releases. Since the NerdDice.com series didn’t have its first video posted until September 12, a ranking of all-time views or even 2022 views isn’t a strong indicator of quality. We continue to make improvements like adding webcam video to the corner of each video and changing the tone of the video descriptions.

In 2022, we published fewer blog posts here, but we did prioritize and publish all the videos for the Getting Started with Rails 7 series. Given the increase in reach over last year, de-prioritizing the blog and prioritizing producing new videos is proving to be the right decision.

I think I recall Gary North talking about technology and the long tail somewhere. When I was looking for that, I re-discovered the gem Economics: Job vs. Calling from the Mises Institute YouTube archives. I had watched the video ten years ago when it was published. I’m thankful that my job and calling are more closely converged today than they were in 2012 and for the opportunity to possibly help others follow the same path.

Looking Forward to 2023

The NerdDice.com series has strong momentum. In 2022, we laid the foundation by setting up GitHub actions and getting Devise installed and tested. In 2023, the actual application design starts. Lord willing, we’ll do some agile backlog population, wire-framing, and actual implementation of features. In addition, I want to do something along the lines of an introduction to programming. We’ve been doing end-to-end journeys through projects, but you need to get to a certain level of proficiency for that to be valuable. I hope to do something in 2023 to bridge that gap for people.