Bert.Gent | Bert De Swaef

The landscape of developer blogs in 2023

15 Apr 2023Random

I was thinking about getting back to blogging. Write tutorials, like I would record them on Youtube, but write them out step by step. For that I wondered if my WordPress blog which I’ve set up ages ago would still do the trick.

So I created a poll on Twitter and I must say I was overwhelmed by the responses it got. At the time of publishing the poll, I had just a few followers less than 700.

It got 941 votes and was seen by more than 15.000 people. In the tweet itself, I also asked them to describe what they were using if their framework or solution wasn’t clearly mentioned in the poll. Which gave me a lot more insight then I was aiming for.

On which platforms are you guys running your blogs?
— Bert De Swaef (@BurtDS) April 10, 2023

As I suspected from the beginning WordPress would still be the way to go for the most people. With 42,5% of the votes, it’s number one.

As a second option I set up October CMS, you could ask yourselves “why?”, well, just because I love working with that CMS. 4,4% of the voters went for that option.

Tailored code got 24,9% of the votes, and in the replies, the frameworks were mentioned.

And lastly, the remaining 28,3% went for “Other“.

In the replies people explained which frameworks, tools or engines they are using. Here is list of the most popular ones.

Laravel (custom-built, these are the hardcore dudes🤘)
Laravel Nova
Statamic
Storyblok
Blogstatic
Ghost
GitHub Pages
11ty
Craft CMS
Hugo
Jekyll
Astro

I must admit, there are few of those on the list that I completely forgot about…

To everyone who replied to this Tweet, thanks! 🙌
For now I’m sticking with my WordPress setup but maybe in a few months, when I find the time I’ll do some custom development for this…

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This was 2022

31 Dec 2022Year Recaps

As the year 2022 comes to an end I took the time to take a look back at what happened during the year.

I have grown as a business owner

I have learned quite a lot during this year, I managed to move forward with my company and take on bigger challenges.

We have built awesome products this year and helped out some new clients and older clients with state-of-the-art tech.

I became a public speaker

Early this year I did a lightning talk at a Full Stack Belgium meetup. I talked about some quick wins in Laravel. Later this year I also did a lightning talk at the Full Stack Europe yearly conference in Antwerp, this time I talked about Procrastination and the Imposter Syndrome, both things I dealt with in the past years.

Taking the stage was a big deal for me personally, it took me a while to decide to finally go for it. My friend Bramus gave me the needed push to commit, a big shoutout to him, “Thank you mate!”.

I received loads of support in this endeavour from Bramus, Dries, Freek, and many others. I already have a next gig planned for a full-length talk during January.

My YouTube Channel got noticed

Even though I started the channel in 2020, I really started putting out videos this year. At the beginning of this year, I only had 38 subscribers, at this moment, on the last day of the year we’re at 606 subscribers.

I never dreamed that I would hit those numbers at all. It’s awesome to see this and it motivated me a lot.

A big thanks to Dary, Povilas, Freek, and many others for the support!

Oh yeah, you can still subscribe here. 😄

In sports

After a big crash in September, where I broke my beloved Cervélo S5, I was lucky to wear a helmet. That helmet really saved my life. So as I did before, I’m advocating to wear helmets even more now.

Besides that, it was quite a good year. I managed to ride my longest ride so far, and set my new record on 206km. I also broke my running distance record and stopped after 51km of running.

Every Wednesday I rode with my local club and that was loads of fun, unfortunately, I can’t tag them here because they don’t have blogs or aren’t on Twitter.

I also competed in a few triathlons, but the most important one was the Challenge geraardsbergen in June.

This was middle distance race, where we covered 1,9km of Swimming, 90km Bike ride with brutal climbs ( 2x the famous Muur and 2x the Congo ) and we closed off with a 21km run also over a hilly terrain with some difficult climbs at the end.

I’m super happy that I managed to complete this race, and by doing so I kept my “clean sheet” of never giving up and always finishing my races. So no DNFs for me.

I already have some new races planned for 2023, a few small ones but the main goal will be the Ironman Knokke. 💪