Time flies…Oh, how true that is! This time last year, I was still considering if I were to start blogging. I mean, that idea was in my head for some time, but I was never truly determined to take that first step. Fortunately, my wife played a crucial role and convinced me to start – so, I was rushing to set everything up in the final days of 2019, as starting a blog was one of my goals in 2019!
The first blog post was published on December 28th 2019, and I believe it’s the right moment to reflect on everything that happened in-between, during this weird and challenging year…
Blogging
Believe it or not, I wrote 69 blog posts this year (this one is 70th)! That gives almost 6 posts per month or approximately 1.5 posts per week! That’s a hell of a lot! Ask other bloggers, and they will confirm it!
Some of the posts were quick and easy to write, but there were many more that required a lot of time and effort to explore the topic and put everything in place.
I firmly believe that content is the king (thanks Amit R S Bansal for this sentence)! Therefore, I was trying my best to produce quality content, that will be both interesting and helpful to other people. And, trust me, there is no better feeling when someone gives you feedback that your text/idea helped to solve her/his problem.
So, I’m not writing for the sake of writing – on the contrary, I’m writing when I “feel” that I have something useful and interesting to share. I’ve started slowly, without any kind of promotion of my blog posts (even on my social network accounts). So, “friends & family” were the only audience in the first few months:)
Somewhere in April, I’ve started to share links to my blog posts on LinkedIn, just to check if others would find something helpful here…And, I’ve immediately got a bunch of positive feedback, which gave me super-motivation to continue!
The number of blog visitors started to grow steadily, and as of today, ~22.000 users visited data-mozart.com! Honestly, I’m blown away by this number!
In total, more than 36.000 unique sessions! That’s just – WOW! As you can spot in the illustration above, until April it was practically nothing, but after I’ve started to share the links on social accounts (I’ve also opened a Twitter account in late May), numbers increased significantly.
As I mentioned, numbers have steadily grown in the last few months, and after ~4.5K users in the previous two or three months, I expect in December to reach a magic number of 5K!
Blog Top Chart
Now, when it comes to the most popular posts, here is the list:
When I explained how to bring life in old-fashioned style table visuals in Power BI, I couldn’t imagine that this article would be read more than 4.500 times! Straight after comes what I consider as my most mature and comprehensive post so far: various use-cases of Synapse Serverless SQL pool in synergy with Power BI and how much each of those use-cases would cost you. I believe this whole 5-part blog series was well worth reading. For this blog series’ success, I owe huge gratitude to Jovan Popovic and Filip Popovic from Microsoft, who helped me absorb various details related to Azure Synapse Analytics.
Bronze medal goes to an article where I demonstrated on a real-life example how to reduce Power BI data model size by 90%! Another 2K+ post is related to performance improvement – this time, how to speed up your Power BI report 5x!
However, this was not a fair game, as some articles were published earlier than others – so, I was curious to find out which articles have most readings per day of their “life” (number of readings divided by number of days since they were published). The charts look little bit different here:
Speaking
In 2020, I’ve kicked off my speaking career! I was reluctant to start speaking for many different reasons, but my fellow countryman and one of the SQL Server experts I admire most, Milos Radivojevic, encouraged me to submit a session for the New Stars of Data conference back in August. I was lucky enough to get a chance from Ben Weismann and William Durkin (co-organizers of the conference), and especially to be paired with Wolfgang Strasser, who was my mentor during the debut session preparation.
I’ve already described my whole experience and how privileged I felt learning from Wolfgang. After that, I got a chance to speak 20 more times, which gives 21 speaking engagements in slightly more than 4 months! I’ve presented at a whole range of different events – from local user group meetings, to 5 SQL Saturdays, and some of the most recognized data conferences around (GroupBy, Data Weekender).
Speaking gave me an opportunity to “meet” some truly wonderful people (at least virtually for now) from every part of the world, and convinced me even more how awesome our data community is!
I honestly appreciate each speaking opportunity and will try to continue sharing my knowledge and experience in 2021 as often as possible…
If there is one single positive thing that this awful pandemic situation brought, that was the possibility to present online, and virtually attend different events in all parts of the planet. That way, I was able to “travel”, for example, from Slovenia to Minnesota in one single day and present at two SQL Saturdays in cities 7.602km distant between themselves! That would of course be impossible in “pre-Covid” times.
Nevertheless, I wish that this situation comes to an end as soon as possible. Meeting all these wonderful data community people in-person, is one of my top wishes in 2021!
Becoming Pluralsight author, “Data God”, MCT…
There were some other professional highlights during this year. In the last quarter, I’ve successfully passed an audition to become a Pluralsight author. I’m still waiting for my first course to be published, as I really want to create something of the highest quality, and this will be one of my main goals in the coming year.
I’ve also had the honor to be proclaimed as “Data God” by one of the data persons I admire most for his community contributions – Chris Wagner. I feel truly humbled and honored to be in company with some of the all-time data greats.
Finally, I’ve also become a Microsoft Certified Trainer in 2020, thanks to Mikey Bronowski and John Deardurff, who supported me in achieving the certificate.
What next?
Well, 2020 was a year to remember – both in positive and negative ways! As I am always optimistic by nature, I sincerely hope that this pandemic will stop sooner rather than later and that I should be able to have a beer or two with all of you amazing people from our community!
As I already mentioned – I wrote 70 blog posts (6 per month), spoke 21 times in the last four months (5 times per month) – which gives approx. 11 engagements per month since August! To drill-down even further, that means one activity every 3 days!
I would lie if I say it wasn’t exhausting sometimes – but, I truly enjoy working with data, and even more enjoy sharing my knowledge and experience. There is no better reward than when someone says to you that your article or idea helped to solve some problem!
I hugely appreciate how much I’ve learned, and how much I’m still learning on a daily basis from different data community experts – that being said, I promise to continue making music from the data in 2021!
Thanks for reading, happy holidays, enjoy the festive period in peace and health, and hope to see a lot of you in-person in 2021!
Last Updated on December 26, 2020 by Nikola
Bob Blackburn
Thanks for a ton of great content. Most people don’t realize how long technical posts take.
Nikola
You are welcome, Bob!