A look back at 2017

31 Dec 2017 - 480 words

I’ve now been blogging consistently for over 2 years (~2 times per/month) and I decided it was time for my first ‘retrospective’ post.

Warning this post contains a large amount of humble brags, if you’ve come here to read about ‘.NET internals’ you’d better check back in a few weeks, when normal service will be resumed!

Overall Stats

Firstly, lets looks at my Google Analytics stats for 2017, showing Page Views and Sessions:

Which clearly shows that I took a bit of a break during the summer! But I still managed over 800K page views, mostly because I was fortunate enough to end up on the front page of HackerNews a few times!

As a comparison, here’s what ‘2017 v 2016’ looks like:

This is cool because it shows a nice trend, more people read my blog posts in 2017 than in 2016 (but I have no idea if it will continue in 2018?!)

Next, here are my top 10 most read posts. Surprising enough my most read post was literally just a list with 68 entries in it!!

Post	Page Views
The 68 things the CLR does before executing a single line of your code	101,382
A Hitchhikers Guide to the CoreCLR Source Code	61,169
A DoS Attack against the C# Compiler	50,884
Analysing C# code on GitHub with BigQuery	40,165
Adding a new Bytecode Instruction to the CLR	39,101
Open Source .NET – 3 years later	36,316
How do .NET delegates work?	36,047
Lowering in the C# Compiler (and what happens when you misuse it)	34,375
How the .NET Runtime loads a Type	32,813
DotNetAnywhere: An Alternative .NET Runtime	26,140

Traffic Sources

I was going to do a write-up on where/how I get my blog traffic, but instead I’d encourage you to read 6 Years of Thoughts on Programming by Henrik Warne as his experience exactly matches mine. But in summary, getting onto the front-page of HackerNews drives a lot of traffic to your site/blog.

Finally, a big thanks to everyone who has read, commented on or shared my blogs posts, it means a lot!!