2019 in Writing

I sent 44 WTHIC letters from 14 countries on four continents, and had ten articles in Quartz. I was also interviewed in the BBC.

This blog was seen by a smidgen over 40K visitors for just under 60K views, and I published 22 posts (many of which just linked out to the proper post elsewhere). This is down from last year’s 45K visitors, just under 73K views and 42 posts published. 2019 was not a great year for writing for me, I mainly focused on writing for Qz, and had multiple multi-month periods of crushing writer’s block.

Most Popular Posts 2019

1. The Cost of Fixing Things. I wrote about burnout, again.
2. Addressing Hiring Gaps Through User Research. A post talking about a research project we were running to understand how technical women navigate their careers, the writeup was shared on the Automattic developer blog.
3. Mastering New Leadership Styles. I am fascinated by the different leadership styles, the need to switch between them, and people’s flexibility or lack thereof. An attempt to distill the ~15 page original article in a more actionable way.
4. Phase 1 of Hiring: Getting from 0-30. I shared how we overhauled the mobile hiring process at Automattic, and some of the data that showed the progress we’d made in terms of diversifying the team.
5. Where do you start when a team is broken? Links out to this post in Qz.

Most Popular Posts Pre-2018

* indicates that this was also on the pre-2018 list last year.

1. Testing Intents on Android: Like Stabbing Yourself in the Eye with a Blunt Implement*. Intent testing was not particularly straight-forward, or well documented, and I shared what I found in a weekend of fighting with it. I think this is one of my best technical posts, and it’s nice to see it still getting the attention it deserves! I want to believe this is because more people are writing tests now.
2. Testing Code that Depends on Remote APIs*. A technical post from 2010 outlining the difficulties of testing code depending on external services and how to work around them.
3. Creating Test Images and Comparing UI Images*. Technical work from Show & Hide on iOS (2015) In which I nerd out about UIImages, creating test images, and comparing them pixel by pixel.
4. Creating and Comparing Images on Android*. More technical work from Show & Hide (2015) – I replicated my work on iOS to create test images, and compare images against each other in tests.
5. iOS: Getting a Thumbnail for a Video*. Another technical post from 2015!
6. Extracting the Dominant Color from an Image in Processing*. An early technical post (2013!) in what went on to become Show & Hide. It’s about determining the dominant color in an image.
7. The Day I Leave the Tech Industry*. From 2014, and still going.  I wrote about feeling like my time in tech was running out – it resonated with a lot of women, and continues to.
8. Honey, I Left the Tech Industry*. Some reflections a year after I left The Conglomerate – what I expected and what I found.
9. The Disillusionment of the Early Career Engineer*. From 2013, some thoughts on common themes I heard in talking to early career engineers.
10. Rest Day – Buffer Day – Focus Day. A post from 2015 about having different kinds of days and themes to make progress. A nice reminder! I should try this again.