Life – The Renegade Coder

Late last year, I realized I couldn't possibly balance everything that I wanted to do, so I took a bit of a break to relax. This year, I want to kick things off right with a manageable game plan. Here's my 2021 roadmap for the site. Laying Out the Roadmap Last December, I took some time off from the site for the first time in at least two years. As I started putting together my 2020 review article, I thought about my mental health and what the best steps would be going into the new year. Here's what I came up with: Cutting Back on Writing For close to two years, I've been consistently publishing twice a week—every Monday and Friday at 10 AM Eastern. While I like this kind of schedule, it's just too much to maintain alongside grad school and a pandemic. Likewise, there's just a lot of other stuff I'd like to be doing like concentrating on the YouTube channel and putting together an exercise routine. As a result, I've decided to cut back on writing a bit. Starting this year, I'll be dropping from twice a week to once a week. Specifically, I'm dropping my Monday time and maintaining my Friday time. This gives me the flexibility to publish on Mondays as needed without feeling forced to have something ready. My goal now will be to try to put together an entire year's worth of posts before the summer, so I can relax and do other things. Ultimately, I'd like to use this time to work on other projects like cleaning up the Sample Programs repo or building up my YouTube channel. After all, I have a ton of Python articles that could use videos! Working on Side Projects As I alluded to in the previous section, one of my goals for the new year will be to have more time for some of my other side projects. For a long time, The Renegade Coder has been my main outlet for writing, but it's become hard to maintain over time. Likewise, it's not the best return on investment at this point. As a result, I'd like to focus on some of my side projects in the new year. For instance, it would be cool to have the Sample Programs repo fully polished before the next Hacktoberfest. In addition, I'd love to get more people using some of my side projects like the PSO2 color picker or the Image Titler. Beyond that, I have a whole other site that I haven't touched in ages that's really bringing in the money. If I can dedicate more time to Trill Trombone, I might be able to work on content creation full time. That's the dream! Speaking of content creation, my YouTube channel has over 100 subs. I'm really impressed by the growth considering I only have 10 videos. Maybe I can double that this year. Bringing Back Ads Look, I hate ads as much as anyone else, but I have really struggled over the last couple years to build traffic and community. For me, ads are a really easy way to pad the small returns from this site. For now, I'm planning just to throw one in the sidebar and one in the footer. It's not much, but it should help me out a bit over the next year. If I have the time, I'll hook the ads in coil, so you can remove them with a coil subscription. For now though, you'll have to deal with just two. As always, an ad blocker can save you from the ads. If you're a heavy user of the site, I wouldn't hold it against you if you ran one yourself. Hell, I use one! It's already bad enough that I can't block ads on my TV, so this little bit of control is nice. Short and Sweet To be honest, I don't want to make a lot of promises this year. In general, I sort of just want to do what brings me joy which is some occasional writing, a little bit of recording, and a little bit of chatting in my Discord. Hopefully, you'll continue to support me in this new year. Otherwise, no worries! I'll be here. As always, I'd appreciate it if you took a moment to check out my list of ways to support the site. Over there, you'll find tons of ways to help me out including subscribing to my YouTube channel, joining the community on Discord, and becoming a Patron. Otherwise, that's all I have for y'all today. Thanks again for hanging out, and happy new year!