It's been a while since I'm doing this, with different levels of consistency but I think it's super important to look back once in a while and see how things went and what can be improved. I've done this for 2024, 2021, 2020. 2023 and 2022 were years where I didn't publish much on the website and I tried to fix that over the year. So let's take a look

AI had an impact

This was the first year where I noticed the impact of AI in the sites. Up until March the site's traffic continued to be stable but then they dropped—by a lot! (sorry for not publishing the numbers but it's something that is not important to demonstrate) I'm not one to worry about analytics, it's really not why I do the website, but I found it interesting. I'm not worried that AI will take my job away, not at all, but it was interesting nevertheless. I wrote about this in my # 6 years, lots of changes post. I started with 0 hits on the website for a while and I'll continue to write even if it reaches that again. The site was created as my personal reference and I'll use it as such until something changes (too far away from retirement but you never know).

More posts than before but not enough

I started posting more. I had a great pace of 5 posts a week a while ago, but I wasn't able to maintain it. I'm doing a lot of mentoring and client work that is using much of the time I have left. The good news is that each time I do it I add 2-3 new articles to write to my list. I'm not sharing any client confidential stuff but seeing where people have issues is always a great way to understand where I can help. So it's not enough for me to have 1 post a week and I want to improve this next year. I need to work on a backlog of articles that can be scheduled so that you have new things to read daily, but that frees me to do different things and don't stress when a day goes by and I didn't post anything.

New sections

I've released two new sections called N8N and Shortcuts. These are tools that I've been using for a while and starting slowly to get enough ideas for articles. There are a lot of communities for this out there and they have huge libraries, but I would like to contribute with my own take on somethings that people could benefit. As always, show people how to do things, even if they are not experts. More articles to come, but no defined timeline. I also started writing about generic things in my opinion section. These are sporadic, but things that I want to put in writing and that I believe that could benefit you

Testing with AI

I've been using AI for a few experiments in areas of the company and it's been an interesting journey. I wrote a post about this called "With AI You need to know more not less". I believe that this is a transformative technology that everyone should use like any tool, but it's a mistake that will replace completely your work. It's a great automation tool and something that I'll also post about, but the important thing is that you are the expert and you should guide it not the other way around. AI companies want to make you believe that you set agents working and forget about it and all will be done 100% perfectly. It's 100% false and if you don't check and put guardrails on your work you'll have issues in the future. Obviously I don't use AI to write articles. I want to do that myself and I don't think that will change. But it's quite useful to ask things like "can you spot inconsistencies", or "do a quick type-check". I don't use Grammaly anymore for example, since I can ask to validate the full text and spot the nuances that a simple grammar checker can't do. For the coding projects it's more or less the same story. I've asked various AI tools to write code with specific guidelines (using things like Speckit for example) but the results are never satisfactory. I end up always reverting the code and implementing things myself. Where AI shines is for things that need refactoring or augmentation. For example, I've seen that having a large database and then asking the agent to take a look at the database and validate the changes and check for potential impacts to the code works really well. It's a very small problem that requires a bit of "inteligence" and knowledge and usually I get good results. So I use it as more as an "autocomplete" than delegation of code, but things can change of course. Finally another area that AI shines are mockups. I've stopped using photoshop for example, and generating a lot of my mockups and things that I need to make visual in HTML. So I can ask the agent to do draft a mockup of something and usually after a few prompts I can get a good reference. It's interactive and I can see in one screen a full picture instead of using diagrams for example, with the added value of pinging the agent for potential improvement areas to get some ideas. I'll post more about this when I feel appropriate, but wanted to drop already some ideas and concepts.

Final Thoughts

So overall I managed to improve and post more but I still need to improve. It's been great as always to receive the feedback so if you have anything in mind don't be shy and send me an email. I usually manage to reply to all emails, even sometimes with a little bit delay. Excited to this year and what it will bring.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash