2021 Retrospective
26 Dec 2021 » Opinion
Here we are again, at the end of another year, a year that many will want to forget. Still, some things have happened and I wanted to share with you my sensations about the last 12 months.
Life
I do not know about you but, to me, this year has been like living in the movie Groundhog Day, especially during the lockdown. It was mid-March 2020 when Adobe told all employees to work from home. Initially, it was for a week, then for a month, then for various months, and, finally, indefinitely. Some offices opened during 2021, but many have closed again. I have been in an Adobe office 3 times and visited one customer.
Each of us has been hit by the pandemic differently. In my case, not being able to travel is what has affected me the most. It was part of the fun of working as an Adobe consultant.
Not everything has been bad during this year. On the plus side:
- I passed the TOGAF 9 Certified exam earlier this month, something I have been aiming at since the beginning of the year. I cannot say I am a TOGAF expert, far from that, but the learnings from it are very interesting and I hope to put them to use in my projects.
- I have started working on AEP projects, which was also one of my goals for 2021. This new tool offers many features that the Adobe Experience Cloud was lacking. New features will continue to be added in 2022. My recommendation to all of you is, if you have the opportunity, to learn about this new tool.
- I have learnt about the SAFe methodology. I do not have any certifications, but now I understand it and I know how to work in this environment. This framework is becoming quite popular and I am seeing more clients adopting it. Surprisingly, even the PI plannings, meant to happen in-person, can be organised remotely.
Blog
The most important change to the blog is its new design, because of the migration from WordPress to Jekyll. Somehow I knew that I would like to have more control over the blog, avoiding a CMS and writing in Markdown. Since the switch, I have been adding minor improvements to it. Sometimes I wonder whether I should have selected Hugo instead of Jekyll. Maybe a project for the future. Another consequence of a static website generator is that the server I need can be smaller, saving a few dollars every month.
Another improvement to the blog was adding a CDN. At some point during 2021 (I cannot remember when), I started using Cloudflare. This should have improved the speed and the security of the website.
Regarding the popularity of the content, I cannot compare it with last year, which is what I would have wanted. The reason is that, with the new implementation, I have also changed the page names. In any case, I can check for the data from the last 6 months and show the top 15 posts, compared to their position last year:
| Pos | Page | Position 2020 | % Page Views | Time Spent Per Visitor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | How to debug an Adobe Analytics implementation | 1 | 6.2% | 334 |
| 2. | Introduction to the Adobe Admin Console | 82 | 3.4% | 120 |
| 3. | Metrics and dimensions in Adobe Analytics | 49 | 2.4% | 305 |
| 4. | Adobe Target Segments | 6 | 2.3% | 298 |
| 5. | The demdex cookie | N/A | 2.2% | 317 |
| 6. | Server-side Adobe Analytics | 2 | 2.2% | 285 |
| 7. | Multi-tenancy in Adobe Target | 5 | 1.8% | 476 |
| 8. | The Adobe Experience Platform Debugger | N/A | 1.7% | 188 |
| 9. | Tutorial: Assets Insights | N/A | 1.5% | 439 |
| 10. | Introduction to Experience Fragments | N/A | 1.4% | 230 |
| 11. | Adobe Analytics Segment Containers | 143 | 1.4% | 311 |
| 12. | Server-side Adobe Target | 158 | 1.4% | 354 |
| 13. | Tutorial AEM-Launch Integration | N/A | 1.4% | 294 |
| 14. | Adobe Analytics Data Warehouse | 4 | 1.3% | 213 |
| 15. | Adobe Analytics Segments - The Basics | 7 | 1.3% | 358 |
While I know it is not a like for like, comparing the results with last year’s ranking is surprising. The top post is still there, although I have now written more up-to-date posts on debugging. A few stay again in the top 15, but those jumping from very low positions to this ranking… I guess there are some reasons I am now aware of.
Moving to basic metrics (page views, visits and visitors), they have been very stable throughout the year. There is a small bump in September, but nothing else worth mentioning.
Finally, the locations where you have been visiting my blog:
The top 3 countries, USA, India and UK, amount to roughly 60% of my visits. Nothing surprising here.
2022?
Who knows what will happen next year. Everybody expected the pandemic to last only a few months and it will soon hit the 2-year mark. I assume that I will be working from home most of the time, on even more AEP projects. I also plan to keep on writing more blog posts on the same topics, as usual, maybe drifting towards more AEP content.
Ah, one last detail: in May I will celebrate my 10th anniversary at Adobe :-)
In the meantime, if you are taking some time off, enjoy the festive season!
Photo by Tarryn Myburgh on Unsplash