Look, I know it’s late, but you’ll have to forgive me! These annual reviews a long time to reflect on and write.
Table of Contents
- Accomplishments in 2024
- Favorite Photos of 2024
- Favorite Creations of 2024
- 5-Year Metrics
- A Look Into 2025
Accomplishments in 2024
2024 was an action packed year for me! Just take a look.
- Had a kiddo!
- Earned my doctorate in Engineering Education
- Wrote a 190 page dissertation
- Secured a role in a study abroad program
- Planned a bachelor party for my best friend
- Served as best man for my best friend’s wedding
- Started and almost caught up in the One Piece manga (caught up in 2025)
- Also, got into manga more generally with Mieruko-chan, Rent-a-Girlfriend, Made in Abyss, Watari-kun, and more!
- Bought my first car
- Held my first baby shower and diaper party
- Converted one of my courses from Eclipse and Subversion to VS Code and git
- Played a lot of video games including Overwatch 2, Pokerogue, Risk of Rain 2, Marvel Rivals, Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, Terraria, No Man’s Sky, and more!
Most of the action was having a kid and finishing my degree, but I got to say that there was a ton I forgot about. In fact, it wasn’t until I was going through some pictures of the last year that I realized just how much happened. How’s that for a segue?
Favorite Photos of 2024
2024 is the year I had my first kid! As a result, there are a lot of photos I would love to share, but I have to be really careful about that. I don’t think my daughter deserves to have her photo posted everywhere, and I certainly don’t trust the internet to treat her photo with respect. As a result, whatever I share of her below will be obviously censored. Just know that like 90% of all photos I took in 2024 were of her—despite how self-centered the following photos might appear.
With that said, here are some of my favorites from the last year!
Overall, it’s really nice to look back over these pictures and think about all the great experiences I had. Perhaps next year, I’ll take the time to properly censor the photos with my daughter.
Favorite Creations of 2024
In 2024, I wrote just as much as always. This year, I stuck to writing once a week, with most of my favorite articles focused on education. Take a peek!
- January 2024: What Do People Mean When They Say “From Scratch”?
- Y’all know I love to discuss software philosophy, so when I had a chance to unpack the term “from scratch,” I took it!
- February 2024: Celebrating My Late Mother’s 54th Birthday
- There were a lot of contenders this month, but family is always going to transcend work for me.
- March 2024: Top Reasons Why You Don’t Need to Take Attendance (And Why I Do It Anyway)
- Sometimes I like to take some time to reflect on my teaching philosophy. I think this piece wonderfully captures a piece of it.
- April 2024: Modeling a Simple Relational Database Using CSVs and Python
- I like this piece because it showcases a project I had been working on while also teaching folks how to do something similar.
- May 2024: Google Threatens to Ruin Search as We Know It
- In May, I seem to have developed a distain for Google and its search engine. In fact, I wrote an entire separate article on how bad the indexing algorithm has gotten. This is one of those takes that has seemingly gotten better with age (especially given that Google has completely capitulated to the petty desires of Trump and Elon in 2025).
- June 2024: 6 Tips for New College and University Educators
- I suppose I couldn’t make it long without writing to future educators. I just like this piece for what it could provide to others.
- July 2024: All But Dissertation: The Light at the End of the Tunnel
- Looking back, talking about being so close to finishing in July is really a trip for me. It’s so nice to be on the other side of the doctoral gauntlet.
- August 2024: A Preview of My Last Semester As a PhD Student
- Again, I know not a lot of coding articles have made their way into my top creations, and I think the reason for that is that my “why” for writing has changed. I want to educate more through narrative (i.e., break down real experiences and reflect on them).
- September 2024: What Is Operator Overloading in Python?
- Okay, fine! Sometimes I like to brag about how amazing Python is as a language, and I think this article really gets at one of my favorite features. It’s especially fun to cover given that I teach Java, which doesn’t have operator overloading, every day.
- October 2024: The Problem Enums Are Intended to Solve
- Late last year, I was having a heard time pitching enums to folks who use Java. After all, there seems to be a culture of “eh, strings are good enough,” where we should have a culture of minimizing future pain. I hope this article serves that purpose.
- November 2024: I Successfully Completed My PhD in Engineering Education
- So many contenders in the month of November, but I have to hand it to my most important achievement of the last six years.
- December 2024: Summarizing My Dissertation for the Layman
- Given that I also spent the last two years working on a dissertation, it’s no surprise that I’m ending the year with talking about it.
In 2025, I look forward to continuing to write about education, but I also want to get back to my roots. If I don’t write about Python, I might forget it!
5-Year Metrics
One of the most boring parts of piecing together this annual review is filling out these tables, BUT I do like to look at the tables. So, it’s a bit of a toss up.
Anyway, the site is in a bit of a decline, which I blame partially on generative AI and partially on Google just getting worse as a search engine. Of course, I am sure my shift to education isn’t doing much for the site’s success. That said, when have I ever written anything for anyone other than myself? Maybe that’s the “problem!”
Regardless, we’ll keep writing! As a reminder, you can see most of these stats directly through Plausible
, but the summaries below should be enough.
Page Views: Months & Years
As mentioned previously, 2024 was a major downturn for the site. Overall, the site received about half of the views it received in previous years. It’s tough to say exactly why because it’s not like I deleted articles. You would expect it to perform roughly the same or better, but I suppose we’ll see in the later sections if any of the usual traffic sources fell off.
| Month | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 21.1k | 11.8k | 13.7k | 25.3k | 8.4k |
| Feb | 24.8k | 11.6k | 14k | 25.5k | 10.2k |
| Mar | 21.9k | 13.9k | 14.4k | 23.2k | 10.2k |
| Apr | 18.8k | 13.9k | 13.4k | 18.1k | 8.3k |
| May | 17k | 11.5k | 14.1k | 18.2k | 6.5k |
| Jun | 13.5k | 11.7k | 13.8k | 14.9k | 5.4k |
| Jul | 13.9k | 10.3k | 14.6k | 14.7k | 5k |
| Aug | 16k | 12.1k | 14.7k | 15.2k | 6.7k |
| Sep | 15.4k | 11.9k | 18.1k | 15.7k | 9.6k |
| Oct | 17.3k | 13.7k | 21k | 12.1k | 9.4k |
| Nov | 15.4k | 13.6k | 22.9k | 10.3k | 6.7k |
| Dec | 12.2k | 12.7k | 22.7k | 8.5k | 6.2k |
| Total | 208k | 149k | 198k | 202k | 93.2k |
Top Posts & Pages
For me, it’s always a bummer when I see Hello World in Brainfuck at the top of the site. While the article is excellent, I didn’t write it! It’s one of a handful of guest posts that has seemingly taken over my site.
That said, what is perhaps an even bigger bummer for me is that these popular pieces are the same every year. I would love for a new article to sneak its way into the top five, but I guess we’ll try again next year!
Top Sources of Traffic
Well, it looks like we got our answer. I wasn’t kidding when I said that Google’s indexing algorithm has gotten objectively worse, at least when it comes to my content. How does Google suddenly decide to nuke my entire site from its search engine?
Though, maybe it isn’t Google’s fault at all. After all, it looks like Bing hasn’t been too kind to me either. Maybe people are just using it less in favor of other tools like TikTok and ChatGPT. I really don’t have a feel for this at all, so I’m just speculating. However, that kind of drop off is jarring—especially considering that I’m seeing growth on DuckDuckGo and Yandex (though, DuckDuckGo has fallen off in the long term).
On the plus side, there are tons of sites now referring to mine, which is driving more stable traffic. For instance, Wikipedia and FreeCodeCamp drove me about 1,000 visitors last year.
| Rank | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Google 92.9k views | Google 74.8k views | Google 136k views | Google 152k views | Google 46k views |
| #2 | Bing 22.3k views | Bing 24.9k views | Bing 23k views | Direct 21.9k views | Direct 17.5k views |
| #3 | DuckDuckGo 19.2k views | DuckDuckGo 20.6k views | Direct 17.5k views | Bing 13.5k views | Bing 9k views |
| #4 | Yahoo 3.9k views | Ecosia 3.8k views | DuckDuckGo 11.1k views | DuckDuckGo 5.2k views | DuckDuckGo 8.8k views |
| #5 | Ecosia 3.1k views | Yahoo 3.5k views | Yahoo 2.7k views | Yandex 3.6k views | Yandex 4.7k views |
| #6 | Dev 2.2k views | Dev 869 views | Yandex 2k views | Yahoo 1.8k views | Yahoo 1.2k views |
| #7 | GitHub 1.3k views | GitHub 682 views | Ecosia 1.9k views | Ecosia 874 views | Brave 974 views |
| #8 | TopDev 810 views | Yandex 557 views | GitHub 449 views | GitHub 320 views | Wikipedia 817 views |
| #9 | Edabit 550 views | Qwant 471 views | Qwant 370 views | Startpage 218 views | FreeCodeCamp 755 views |
| #10 | Qwant 500 views | Edabit 216 views | StartPage 196 views | Qwant 161 views | Ecosia 583 views |
Top Countries
I don’t have much to say about the countries. Nothing seems really out of the ordinary.
| Rank | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | United States of America 57.6k views | United States of America 44.3k views | United States of America 61.3k views | United States of America 68k views | United States of America 21.5k views |
| #2 | India 20.9k views | India 17.4k views | India 23.4k views | India 23.3k views | India 9.9k views |
| #3 | Germany 14.2k views | United Kingdom 8.4k views | United Kingdom 10.2k views | United Kingdom 10.2k views | Russia 7.9k views |
| #4 | United Kingdom 10.5k views | Germany 8.2k views | Germany 9.8k views | Germany 9.7k views | Germany 4k views |
| #5 | Canada 7.7k views | Canada 5.7k views | Canada 8k views | Russia 8.1k views | United Kingdom 3.8k views |
| #6 | France 5.3k views | France 4.4k views | France 5.5k views | Canada 7.1k views | Brazil 3.4k views |
| #7 | Australia 3.8k views | Russia 3.8k views | Russia 5.4k views | France 5k views | France 3k views |
| #8 | Netherlands 3.6k views | Netherlands 2.9k views | Brazil 4.1k views | Brazil 3.9k views | Canada 2.6k views |
| #9 | Brazil 3.3k views | Australia 2.9k views | Australia 3.9k views | Australia 3.8k views | Poland 1.8k views |
| #10 | Russia 2.7k views | Brazil 2.5k views | Netherlands 3.6k views | Netherlands 3.3k views | Philippines 1.5k views |
Top YouTube Videos
A few years back, I started a YouTube channel. To be honest, I haven’t touched it in ages. That said, it doesn’t hurt to see how views are doing. If anything, this is a small case study in the decay of a channel.
That said, it seems like I’m still getting a few hundred views a year! I’m kind of impressed. In total, I gained 9 subscribers and received 825 views on an otherwise dead channel. I even got 24 hours of watch time somehow. Not bad!
Total Revenue
Now, we get to the fun part! To start, here’s my Patreon revenue. In short, I made a bit more money over the last two years, but it’s definitely not my best year.
| Month | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | $17.37 | $18.14 | $13.99 | $9.07 | $9.07 |
| Feb | $17.37 | $18.14 | $13.99 | $9.07 | $9.07 |
| Mar | $17.37 | $18.14 | $13.99 | $9.07 | $9.07 |
| Apr | $17.37 | $18.14 | $13.99 | $9.07 | $9.07 |
| May | $23.75 | $18.14 | $13.22 | $9.07 | $13.22 |
| Jun | $23.75 | $18.14 | $9.07 | $4.92 | $13.22 |
| Jul | $23.74 | $18.14 | $9.07 | $4.92 | $13.22 |
| Aug | $23.74 | $18.14 | $9.07 | $9.07 | $13.22 |
| Sep | $23.75 | $18.14 | $9.07 | $9.07 | $13.22 |
| Oct | $23.75 | $18.14 | $9.07 | $9.07 | $13.22 |
| Nov | $18.14 | $9.84 | $9.07 | $9.07 | $13.22 |
| Dec | $18.14 | $9.84 | $9.07 | $9.07 | $17.37 |
| Total | $248.24 | $201.08 | $132.67 | $100.54 | $146.19 |
Next, we’ll take a look at earnings from Amazon. Keep in mind that most of the money I make is from TrillTrombone, but I still list it here. I made all of 40 cents from affiliate marketing on TheRenegadeCoder last year. Regardless, I’ll take it!
| Month | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | $1.49 | $4.23 | $20.51 | $20.62 | $15.32 |
| Feb | $0.00 | $14.30 | $11.03 | $12.53 | $5.19 |
| Mar | $12.70 | $8.51 | $9.53 | $14.62 | $4.11 |
| Apr | $11.63 | $8.18 | $4.71 | $7.47 | $5.94 |
| May | $0.90 | $6.09 | $7.50 | $8.53 | $9.47 |
| Jun | $12.78 | $4.12 | $2.82 | $0.28 | $6.92 |
| Jul | $0.98 | $2.66 | $0.37 | $9.27 | $5.38 |
| Aug | $0.94 | $2.20 | $12.21 | $26.95 | $10.13 |
| Sep | $0.62 | $4.37 | $8.97 | $19.71 | $12.90 |
| Oct | $0.38 | $9.84 | $34.35 | $31.02 | $4.67 |
| Nov | $8.59 | $10.84 | $18.70 | $28.19 | $4.57 |
| Dec | $7.24 | $4.39 | $18.47 | $85.76 | $22.78 |
| Total | $58.25 | $79.73 | $149.17 | $264.95 | $104.89 |
Finally, ad revenue is somewhat of a silly topic given how much viewership I lost, but I’ll share it anyway. In short, I didn’t even make enough to receive a payout for the year.
| Month | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | $0.00 | $2.72 | $7.91 | $9.20 | $5.99 |
| Feb | $0.00 | $8.34 | $12.37 | $11.55 | $2.68 |
| Mar | $0.00 | $9.23 | $12.61 | $9.01 | $2.31 |
| Apr | $0.00 | $8.76 | $2.48 | $12.59 | $1.58 |
| May | $0.00 | $6.27 | $4.40 | $7.35 | $1.34 |
| Jun | $0.00 | $10.98 | $9.19 | $9.34 | $1.24 |
| Jul | $0.00 | $7.67 | $5.64 | $11.46 | $0.85 |
| Aug | $0.00 | $7.23 | $6.23 | $4.60 | $1.68 |
| Sep | $0.00 | $14.55 | $8.41 | $11.25 | $2.25 |
| Oct | $0.00 | $18.63 | $12.09 | $3.12 | $1.49 |
| Nov | $0.00 | $18.99 | $10.37 | $4.95 | $1.82 |
| Dec | $0.00 | $10.89 | $9.78 | $5.53 | $2.22 |
| Total | $0.00 | $124.26 | $101.50 | $99.95 | $25.45 |
In the year 2024, it looks like I made about $276.45. Next, we’ll see how that compares to how much I spent on the site.
Total Expenses
Now, let’s take a look at how much I sink into this site! Hobbies are always expensive, I suppose.
| Month | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| January | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| February | $87.00 | $77.00 |
| March | $0.00 | $17.00 |
| April | $100.00 | $264.26 |
| May | $410.23 | $506.74 |
| June | $34.00 | $51.00 |
| July | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| August | $17.00 | $17.00 |
| September | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| October | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| November | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| December | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Total | $648.23 | $933.00 |
If you’re curious what some of these expenses include, it’s mostly hosting and domains. In addition, I pay for a handful of helpful tools like Plausible for analytics and WordFence for security. Surely I could scale back if I really needed the money.
Net Income
As you can probably imagine, the site eats up a lot of my personal income. I could probably scale back, but I enjoy doing this. Maybe in the future it will pay for itself. That said, based on historical revenue, I don’t see that happening any time soon.
| Year | Revenue | Expenses | Net Income |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | $276.45 | $(933.00) | $(656.47) |
| 2023 | $465.44 | $(648.23) | $(182.79) |
| 2022 | $383.34 | – | – |
| 2021 | $405.07 | – | – |
| 2020 | $306.49 | – | – |
| 2019 | $266.73 | – | – |
| 2018 | $49.96 | – | – |
| Total | $2,183.48 | $(1581.23) | $602.25 |
As a reminder, there is expense data missing from this chart. I am certain I’ve sunk multiple thousands of dollars into the site since 2018, but that’s part of the fun!
A Look Into 2025
By the time this article publishes, we’ll already be quite deep into 2025. That said, there’s a lot to look forward to. For instance, I’m traveling to Japan in May of this year. Likewise, I am planning to go to my first stadium series game at the beginning of march, and we even have camping planned for June! Who knows what the second half of 2025 will hold?
As always, thanks for taking a peek at my annual review. Maybe next year I’ll actually publish it in time. Until then, feel free to read one of my previous reviews:
- 2023: Year in Review
- 2022: Year in Review
- 2021: Year in Review
- 2020: Year in Review
- 2019: Year in Review
Of course, after seeing my take home pay from the site, I’m sure you’re looking to support me more. If so, check out my list of ways to grow the site. Otherwise, I’ll see you next year!
Recent Meta Posts
It's 2025, and we're kicking off the year with some huge news! The Sample Programs repo has hit 1,000 code snippets. Let's talk about them.
With 2023 officially in the books, I figured it was time to do my annual article looking back over the year. Think of it as the Spotify Wrapped for the 3 people who read these articles!