2022 was a weird year as we transitioned out of the pandemic (though, I did get COVID). In it, I managed to turn 28, pass my candidacy exam, and travel to see my friends and family. Who knows what 2023 will bring, but 2022 was a year to remember. Let’s talk about it!
But before we do that, I wanted to start the year off right by trying to get my mom some extra help. If you didn’t know, she’s been battling small cell lung cancer since 2021. More recently, she’s started some clinical trials that’ll involve a lot of costly travel. If you have a moment, I’d love it if you could give the GoFundMe a share
and even donate if you have a few bucks to spare. We appreciate it!
And without further ado, let’s look back over 2022 with The Renegade Coder.
Table of Contents
Accomplishments in 2022
In 2022, life went somewhat back to normal, for better or worse. Regardless, I did a bit of traveling finally. That said, nothing too special this year. Here’s the list I had off the top of my head:
- Passed my Candidacy Exam
- Beat Cyberpunk 2077
- Turned 28
- I won another teaching award
- Watched a lot of movies, series, and anime
- Continued my Duolingo streak to 1700+ days
- Visited family for holidays
- Expanded several open-source libraries including SnakeMD
- Finished taking college classes forever
- Visited Vegas for the first time
- Watched a buddy get engaged and another get married
- Went camping, again
- Caught up with some old friends
- Went to my 10-year high school reunion
- Watched a lot of hockey
- Ate a lot of food
- Mentored a hackathon
- Got COVID
Obviously, I’m most stoked about passing my candidacy exam. I’m in the last leg of my degree, and I’m excited to get it done!
Favorite Photos of 2022
Just like last year, I figured I’d share some of my favorite photos of the last year (apologies for the formatting; WordPress galleries are broken in version 6.1.1):
You can definitely tell I spent a lot more time with family and friends this year. It feels good to look at these.
Favorite Creations of 2022
As usual, I like to share my favorite articles and videos that I created in the past year. Here’s the list:
- January 2022: How to Convert Markdown to a PDF: 3 Quick Solutions
- Most of the resources I made were for actual students, and this really kicked it off. Also, it doesn’t help that I’m somewhat obsessed with markdown it seems.
- February 2022: How to Code Wordle Into a Discord Bot
- Wordle seems like a blip in history at this point, but there was a moment when I made it for one of my personal Discord bots. Looking back, that’s a pretty cool feature.
- March 2022: I Won the Graduate Associate Teaching Award!
- Almost a year ago now, I won my graduate associate teaching award. It’s not like I don’t feel like I deserve it, but I find the recognition a little strange. Anyone, it’ll definitely help me secure a job in the future, so that’s exciting!
- April 2022: Meet Pymon: A Discord Bot That Can Answer Any Question You Want
- If 2022 was characterized by anything other than markdown, it was Discord. I spent a lot of time working on Discord projects against my better judgement. But I think this one really worked out.
- May 2022: The Complete Guide to SnakeMD: A Python Library for Generating Markdown
- Surprise, surprise! Markdown made the list again. This time in a fully built out markdown library in Python. The wildest part is that 30 people are using it!
- June 2022: Looking Forward to Life as an Educator: Course Preferences
- Okay I lied! Clearly, my themes in 2022 were teaching, markdown, and Discord. I wrote this article while brainstorming courses that I’d love to teach.
- July 2022: The Renegade’s Guide to PC Building: Unveiling Version 2.0
- Now, this article is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. Whenever I have some cash, I like to upgrade my PC. Having changed so many of the original parts, I figured I’d write about it.
- August 2022: 5 Ways to Write Hello World in Python
- Well, I suppose I couldn’t help myself in blending together some of my favorite topics: obfuscation and python. If you like cursed code, this one is for you.
- September 2022: I Finally Figured Out Python’s Module and Package System
- It wouldn’t be The Renegade Coder if I wasn’t shilling Python. That said, this article is a bit of a criticism of Python given how hard it is to actually put together a working module.
- October 2022: The Official Recursion Cheat Sheet
- It doesn’t show in this list, but I also wrote a lot about recursion in this list. It seems I keep finding ways to explain recursion to new folks.
- November 2022: 5 Ways to Share Code in Discord
- Now, this is an article that bridges a few of my 2022 themes: teaching and Discord. In fact, I actually think this article mentions markdown as well. That’s one way to ring in the new year!
- December 2022: I Am a PhD Candidate!
- Oh, did I mention that I passed my candidacy exam? Yeah, I’m on my way to finally finishing my degree. I’m so excited.
As usual, I don’t really plan out future content, but I’ll be posting once a week as always.
Projects in 2022
Normally, I would take some time to cover all my projects of the year in detail, but I’m trying to simplify these annual posts a bit. As a result, I’ll just share a list of some of my favorite projects of the year:
- SnakeMD: this has been a fun project for me. In short, it’s a Python library for generating markdown. At first, I made it just to be able to automate portions of the Sample Programs repo, but it turned into so much more. I hope folks are enjoying it.
- Pymon: there’s a whole article on Pymon, but the short story is that she’s a Discord bot for one of the courses I teach. Students love her!
- Health Dashboard: at some point, I started caring more about my wellness. Out of that passion came this cool dashboard which catalog’s my efforts to stay healthy. Definitely something I want to expand in the future.
- Educator Dashboard: like the health dashboard, but this one shares information about my life as an educator. It includes all sorts of awesome graphics showing my journey.
- Mage Game: in the summer of 2022, I got interested in game development in Python. As a result, I ended up making a little 2D mage sandbox game. I’d love to keep working on it at some point.
In the future, I’m not sure what I’ll focus on, but these were a lot of fun in 2022.
5-Year Metrics
In the the past, I’d usually use this space to share all the data I’ve collected about the site. Seeing as we’re in year 6 of the site, it’s become a bit messy. As a result, I’ve opted for cutting this section down to the last 5 years of data. If you want to see the history of this website, feel free to use my Plausible dashboard. Otherwise, here’s the latest.
Page Views: Months & Years
As usual, here are my page view stats by month and year from 2018 to 2022:
| Month | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 427 | 19.1k | 21.1k | 11.8k | 13.7k |
| Feb | 397 | 16.2k | 24.8k | 11.6k | 14k |
| Mar | 1.1k | 31.0k | 21.9k | 13.9k | 14.4k |
| Apr | 1.3k | 45.4k | 18.8k | 13.9k | 13.4k |
| May | 1.4k | 52.7k | 17k | 11.5k | 14.1k |
| Jun | 780 | 26.7k | 13.5k | 11.7k | 13.8k |
| Jul | 1.7k | 19.8k | 13.9k | 10.3k | 14.6k |
| Aug | 1.9k | 19.9k | 16k | 12.1k | 14.7k |
| Sep | 5.7k | 22.5k | 15.4k | 11.9k | 18.1k |
| Oct | 10.9k | 17.8k | 17.3k | 13.7k | 21k |
| Nov | 9.9k | 15.0k | 15.4k | 13.6k | 22.9k |
| Dec | 13.9k | 11.8k | 12.2k | 12.7k | 22.7k |
| Total | 49.6k | 298k | 208k | 149k | 198k |
Overall, I’m very pleased with the page view stats in 2022. These are the highest stats I’ve had heading into a new year, so I expect the growth to explode. That said, I am a little concerned that one of my articles is carrying all the traffic again, but I’ll talk about that later.
Top Posts & Pages
As always, here are the top performing posts and pages that led to the website growth in 2022:
While the spread of top posts isn’t as top heavy as in years past, I am somewhat concerned about this distribution going forward. Most recently, the increment post has skyrocketed to over a 1000 visitors a week. That means we could be seeing a trend like 2019 again when that post inevitably falls in ranking. That said, I suppose I’ll ride that high for as long as I can.
Top Sources of Traffic
Once again, here are the last 5 years of page view sources:
| Rank | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Google 39k views | Google 259K views | Google 92.9k views | Google 74.8k views | Google 136k views |
| #2 | GitHub 809 views | DuckDuckGo 4.8k views | Bing 22.3k views | Bing 24.9k views | Bing 23k views |
| #3 | Bing 451 views | Bing 4.8k views | DuckDuckGo 19.2k views | DuckDuckGo 20.6k views | Direct 17.5k views |
| #4 | Google+ 266 views | WordPress Android App 1.3k views | Yahoo 3.9k views | Ecosia 3.8k views | DuckDuckGo 11.1k views |
| #5 | WordPress Reader 247 views | GitHub 967 views | Ecosia 3.1k views | Yahoo 3.5k views | Yahoo 2.7k views |
| #6 | Twitter 246 views | Yahoo Search 777 views | Dev 2.2k views | Dev 869 views | Yandex 2k views |
| #7 | DuckDuckGo 215 views | Ecosia 522 views | GitHub 1.3k views | GitHub 682 views | Ecosia 1.9k views |
| #8 | Facebook 193 views | Twitter 289 views | TopDev 810 views | Yandex 557 views | GitHub 449 views |
| #9 | Instagram 86 views | Qwant 160 views | Edabit 550 views | Qwant 471 views | Qwant 370 views |
| #10 | Yahoo 85 views | Yandex 144 views | Qwant 500 views | Edabit 216 views | StartPage 196 views |
Again, I’m a little nervous about these trends given that Google has exploded to the top again while other sources have dropped. I’m not sure what that says exactly, but it’s a concerning trend for sure.
Top Countries
I always find it interesting to see where my traffic comes from in terms of geography. Obviously, I imagine most of it comes from the US, but it’s cool to see the other places as well:
| Rank | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | United States of America 20,949 views | United States of America 115,649 views | United States of America 57.6k views | United States of America 44.3k views | United States of America 61.3k views |
| #2 | India 6,230 views | India 33,496 views | India 20.9k views | India 17.4k views | India 23.4k views |
| #3 | United Kingdom 2,581 views | United Kingdom 14,206 views | Germany 14.2k views | United Kingdom 8.4k views | United Kingdom 10.2k views |
| #4 | Canada 1,716 views | Germany 13,664 views | United Kingdom 10.5k views | Germany 8.2k views | Germany 9.8k views |
| #5 | Germany 1,517 views | Canada 11,003 views | Canada 7.7k views | Canada 5.7k views | Canada 8k views |
| #6 | France 1,066 views | France 8,636 views | France 5.3k views | France 4.4k views | France 5.5k views |
| #7 | Australia 807 views | Brazil 6,097 views | Australia 3.8k views | Russia 3.8k views | Russia 5.4k views |
| #8 | Israel 718 views | Australia 5,445 views | Netherlands 3.6k views | Netherlands 2.9k views | Brazil 4.1k views |
| #9 | Brazil 685 views | Netherlands 4,847 views | Brazil 3.3k views | Australia 2.9k views | Australia 3.9k views |
| #10 | Netherlands 611 views | Spain 4,237 views | Russia 2.7k views | Brazil 2.5k views | Netherlands 3.6k views |
As usual, nothing is too surprising here. Only surprise right now is the jump in views from Brazil, but everything else lines up with history.
Top YouTube Videos
In 2022, I did not make a single YouTube video. Obviously, I would have liked to, but it’s not exactly winning the competition with grad school at the moment. We’ll see how things go in the future. Anyway, here are the top videos since I started the channel:
I have to say, despite posting any new content, the videos are steadily gaining views. That’s nice to see!
Total Revenue
Okay, now we get into the messy stuff. Unfortunately, I don’t have a nice dashboard for this, so you’ll have to deal with some more tables. To start, let’s look at Patreon income:
| Month | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | $0.00 | $17.37 | $18.14 | $13.99 |
| Feb | $0.00 | $17.37 | $18.14 | $13.99 |
| Mar | $0.00 | $17.37 | $18.14 | $13.99 |
| Apr | $0.00 | $17.37 | $18.14 | $13.99 |
| May | $0.00 | $23.75 | $18.14 | $13.22 |
| Jun | $0.00 | $23.75 | $18.14 | $9.07 |
| Jul | $8.30 | $23.74 | $18.14 | $9.07 |
| Aug | $22.72 | $23.74 | $18.14 | $9.07 |
| Sep | $22.72 | $23.75 | $18.14 | $9.07 |
| Oct | $22.72 | $23.75 | $18.14 | $9.07 |
| Nov | $22.72 | $18.14 | $9.84 | $9.07 |
| Dec | $22.72 | $18.14 | $9.84 | $9.07 |
| Total | $121.90 | $248.24 | $201.08 | $132.67 |
It may come as no surprise, but the Patreon income has fallen off! I still post there weekly, but I don’t have much of an incentive to pay attention to it. Maybe it’ll grow this year!
On the plus side, my Amazon income is going great. Take a look:
| Month | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | $0.00 | $1.49 | $4.23 | $20.51 |
| Feb | $0.00 | $0.00 | $14.30 | $11.03 |
| Mar | $0.00 | $12.70 | $8.51 | $9.53 |
| Apr | $0.00 | $11.63 | $8.18 | $4.71 |
| May | $0.00 | $0.90 | $6.09 | $7.50 |
| Jun | $0.00 | $12.78 | $4.12 | $2.82 |
| Jul | $0.00 | $0.98 | $2.66 | $0.37 |
| Aug | $0.00 | $0.94 | $2.20 | $12.21 |
| Sep | $0.00 | $0.62 | $4.37 | $8.97 |
| Oct | $0.20 | $0.38 | $9.84 | $34.35 |
| Nov | $0.00 | $8.59 | $10.84 | $18.70 |
| Dec | $0.00 | $7.24 | $4.39 | $18.47 |
| Total | $0.20 | $58.25 | $79.73 | $149.17 |
So, while Patreon is in a recession, Amazon is doing well for me. Now, let’s take a look at ad revenue:
| Month | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | $0.00 | $12.84 | $0.00 | $2.72 | $7.91 |
| Feb | $0.34 | $8.93 | $0.00 | $8.34 | $12.37 |
| Mar | $1.68 | $21.71 | $0.00 | $9.23 | $12.61 |
| Apr | $1.68 | $28.18 | $0.00 | $8.76 | $2.48 |
| May | $1.49 | $30.53 | $0.00 | $6.27 | $4.40 |
| Jun | $1.05 | $17.00 | $0.00 | $10.98 | $9.19 |
| Jul | $1.94 | $10.67 | $0.00 | $7.67 | $5.64 |
| Aug | $0.56 | $9.78 | $0.00 | $7.23 | $6.23 |
| Sep | $5.87 | $4.99 | $0.00 | $14.55 | $8.41 |
| Oct | $9.28 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $18.63 | $12.09 |
| Nov | $12.19 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $18.99 | $10.37 |
| Dec | $15.56 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $10.89 | $9.78 |
| Total | $49.96 | $144.63 | $0.00 | $124.26 | $101.50 |
Ad revenue is a messy thing and does not seem to be too consistent. To be fair, I did try picking up a new ad network (Ezoic), but they were particularly annoying about my “bad traffic.” That could explain the dip in revenue in April and May. In the future, I’ll probably target a more premium ad network, but AdSense will have to work for now.
With all that said, there are other ways I’ve earned income in the past like selling PDFs through the shop and launching membership sites. I don’t think it’s important to include them anymore, but you’re free to browse my older annual reviews to see what I’m talking about. Regardless, in 2022, I made about $383, which isn’t too bad for something I do for fun. With that said, let’s move on!
Total Expenses
This article has been posted for a couple months, but I’m finally getting around to my taxes. As a result, I thought it would be helpful to also track my expenses. For the moment, I’ll track this year’s expenses, but I may swing by later and add in the last couple of years as well.
To start, I want to talk about web hosting. It is by far my biggest expense, but it isn’t too bad all things considered:
| Month | 2022 |
|---|---|
| January | $0.00 |
| February | $0.00 |
| March | $61.18 |
| April | $185.42 |
| May | $0.00 |
| June | $0.00 |
| July | $0.00 |
| August | $0.00 |
| September | $0.00 |
| October | $0.00 |
| November | $0.00 |
| December | $0.00 |
| Total | $246.60 |
Alongside hosting, I also pay quite a bit for domain registration across a portfolio of websites including this one:
| Month | 2022 |
|---|---|
| January | $0.00 |
| February | $0.00 |
| March | $0.00 |
| April | $48.00 |
| May | $10.00 |
| June | $0.00 |
| July | $10.00 |
| August | $0.00 |
| September | $0.00 |
| October | $0.00 |
| November | $0.00 |
| December | $0.00 |
| Total | $68.00 |
Outside of hosting and domain registration, a solid portion of my expenses are on web services such as Plausible, WordFence, and SSL certificates:
| Month | 2022 |
|---|---|
| January | $0.00 |
| February | $77.00 (Link Whisper) |
| March | $0.00 |
| April | $25.00 (SSL) |
| May | $96.00 (Plausible) |
| June | $0.00 |
| July | $0.00 |
| August | $0.00 |
| September | $0.00 |
| October | $0.00 |
| November | $0.00 |
| December | $0.00 |
| Total | $198.00 |
In 2022, I spent about $512 to keep everything running. Not bad for a fun little hobby. Regardless, let’s go ahead and call it a day!
A Look into 2023
At this point, it’s probably clear that I don’t plan that much. Going into 2023, I’m just looking to keep up the good work. Hopefully by this time next year, I’ll have a lot to talk about in terms of life changes. However, for now, I’m just going to keep grinding. If this massive post wasn’t enough for you, here’s my first post in 2023: There Has to Be a Better Way: Reflecting on My Automation Catchphrase. Otherwise, that’s it for the yearly review! Let’s chat next time.
Recent Meta Posts
Rarely do I like to fill up this site with ramblings about my life, but this year has been off the rails. As a result, I can't seem to inspire myself to write about software. Instead, I'd like to...
Life has given me a bit of a beating, so I'm taking some time to recover. See y'all again soon.