Bulletin report (2022)
Table of contents
This report summarises the publication of the bulletin in 2022.
An attempt to draw some insights from the publication of the weekly bulletins in 2022. See also previous years:
As usual, let's start with some general numbers to frame the rest of the report. This year I'll pull in numbers from las year as well to compare.
title | 2021 | 2022 |
---|---|---|
Number of resources read | 1101 | 639 |
Number of resources published | 306 | 306 |
Number of sources | 33 | 53 |
Number of sources not used | 14 | 27 |
This year I read substantially less than previous years likely due to changing jobs. I didn't realise I added 20 new sources to my weekly routine, I should do some pruning, it's getting wild.
The numbers per week have dropped as expected although the maximum stays quite the same.
metric | 2021 | 2022 |
---|---|---|
week count | 52.0 | 51.0 |
mean | 21.2 | 12.5 |
std | 7.2 | 6.2 |
min | 9.0 | 5.0 |
25% | 16.0 | 8.0 |
50% | 20.5 | 12.0 |
75% | 24.2 | 14.5 |
max | 44.0 | 43.0 |
# Resources
I believe all web resources should be accessible via HTTPS so whenever I find a URL using HTTP, I manualy change it to HTTPS. It turns out that some places are either not publishing in HTTPS or doing so but neglecting it (e.g. expired or untrusted certificates). This is the split of resources by either HTTP or HTTPS.
title | 2021 | 2022 |
---|---|---|
Number of resources read using HTTPS | 1088 | 632 |
Number of resources published using HTTPS | 305 | 304 |
Number of resources read using HTTP | 13 | 7 |
Number of resources published using HTTP | 1 | 2 |
Year after year some resources persist in not offering HTTPS. Patience.
# Sources
My regular sources are where I find most of my readings. These are the top 10 sources and the total resources I found thanks to them. Notice that this year “webtoolsweekly” didn't make the cut and instead “family” got in.
source | 2021 | 2022 |
---|---|---|
lobsters | 218 | 146 |
136 | 133 | |
tldr | 51 | 45 |
weekrust | 70 | 28 |
work | 83 | 27 |
friend | 20 | 20 |
family | 17 | 19 |
dataelixir | 59 | 14 |
github | 22 | 13 |
softwareleadweekly | 27 | 12 |
In contrast with the top 10 sources for resources I chose for the bulletins:
source | 2021 | 2022 |
---|---|---|
lobsters | 69 | 72 |
32 | 59 | |
tldr | 25 | 24 |
work | 14 | 13 |
weekrust | 10 | 11 |
github | 12 | 10 |
friend | 6 | 10 |
dataelixir | 21 | 8 |
webtoolsweekly | 12 | 8 |
family | 8 | 7 |
The sources mostly maintain the order from 2021. Next year this will change given that I stopped using Twitter in favour of Mastodon.
Similar to 2021, I read a few articles from “softwareleadweekly” but only a couple got into the bulletin.
Another way of thinking about sources is to look at how often domains repeat. It's a weird one though given that a single domain doesn't necessarily equate to a single publisher. Good examples of this are github.com
, youtube.com
or medium.com
. In any case, see below the list of domains I read more than 4 times:
domain | total |
---|---|
github.com | 128 |
medium.com | 12 |
dev.to | 8 |
blog.logrocket.com | 6 |
In contrast, these are the top 10 domains from resources published in the bulletin:
domain | 2021 | 2022 |
---|---|---|
github.com | 61 | 87 |
www.youtube.com | 2 | 4 |
www.joshwcomeau.com | 0 | 3 |
notes.eatonphil.com | 0 | 3 |
fly.io | 0 | 3 |
ncase.me | 0 | 2 |
medium.com | 2 | 2 |
github.blog | 0 | 2 |
dev.to | 4 | 2 |
christine.website | 0 | 2 |
GitHub stays as the dominant domain which is not a surprise, most times I share an interesting tool I use their repository which is rarely not in GitHub. The rest is mostly disjoint with last year which again is what I would expect given the diversity of domains people use to publish resources.
# Topics
Once I read an article I tag it with a set of tags that I think represent the topic of the article. The top 10 tags are:
tag | 2021 | 2022 |
---|---|---|
rust | 188 | 151 |
tool | 125 | 91 |
web | 99 | 64 |
data | 98 | 54 |
database | 44 | 50 |
sqlite | 27 | 43 |
software_development | 48 | 42 |
javascript | 55 | 40 |
webassembly | 61 | 39 |
management | 51 | 32 |
And the top 10 that where published in the bulletin:
tag | 2021 | 2022 |
---|---|---|
rust | 44 | 72 |
tool | 60 | 62 |
database | 21 | 33 |
data | 24 | 32 |
web | 39 | 31 |
sqlite | 14 | 31 |
javascript | 24 | 23 |
software_development | 15 | 20 |
typescript | 7 | 18 |
python | 18 | 18 |
Rust stays as my main interest, tools over other kinds of resources as well and there is a noticeable shift from API to databases, SQLite in particular. Interestingly enough, my curated list of SQLite resources, Some SQLite hasn't grown faster than in 2021.
For a second year, WebAssembly doesn't show often enough in the bulletin although it has been, with Rust, my main foucus for years.
# Link rot
Link rot is the phenomenon of URLs ceasing to point to their originally targeted resource due to that resource being relocated to a new address or becoming permanently unavailable.
year | total |
---|---|
2020 | 10 |
2021 | 5 |
2022 | 4 |
rot_kind | total |
---|---|
unavailable | 5 |
security_issue | 5 |
domain_change | 3 |
permanent_redirect | 6 |
unavailable
means the domain is no longer available and I couldn't find another place with the resource.security_issue
means there is some sort of issue with the TLS certificate, probably it's expired.domain_change
means the domain is no longer available but I found the resource in a new domain.permanent_redirect
means the resource was no longer in the expected URL but I found a different URL with the same domain.
Out of 918 (306 resources per year), 19 have been neglected with 5 no longer working at all and 5 being in question.
Although the rot is not massive, it's evidence of how naive was the idea of URLs being permanent identifiers forever. Forever is a long time.
The good news is that I recovered 9 links which are now updated in the website version of the bulletin.
# Conclusions
In 2020 I thought I would record more information so I could answer:
- How often do I find a resource and leave it for a while to read?
- When so, how long does it take for me from finding it to reading it?
- Is there any impact on my reading habits when I'm on leave?
For a second year in a row, I haven't managed to incorporate enough information to address them. Maybe 2023 is the year?
Changing jobs has made a big impact on the bulletin. I had less time for reading or I was too tired to do so, and the context change has influenced the kind of resources I foucus on. 2021 was orbiting around data standards, API design and alike however 2022 has been about software development, distributed systems, and databases.
My personal interests, however, have remained roughly unchanged: Rust, offline-first tooling and WebAssembly.