2019 in Review - A Massive Year for TutorialEdge

2019 has been an absolutely spectacular year for myself and TutorialEdge. In a professional capacity, I feel that this year has been the most challenging and rewarding year yet. I’ve started working in a more dev-ops based role and I’ve been able to learn far more about things like low-level networking and the underlying infrastructure upon which our applications live on.

A Massive Thank You!

First of all, I’d like to thank each and every person that visited the site and supported me this year through subscribing to my channel or following me on Twitter!

I’d also like to give a massive thanks to everyone that bought me a coffee or supported the site through becoming Patreon supporters. Your generosity was very much appreciated and it always puts a huge smile on my face knowing that my content has helped you out in such a big way!

DigitalOcean Sponsorship!

One of the most noticeable achievements this year for the site was gaining a huge sponsor through talks with DigitalOcean. This came as a huge surprise for me and I am absolutely delighted with the support they have shown both my site and my YouTube content.

I have a number of videos and massive projects based around the topic of Cloud Computing that I’m looking to add to the site that will heavily feature some of the amazing products that DigitalOcean has to offer. Their incredibly simple user interface will allow me to focus on teaching the underlying cloud concepts that are transferrable across any large cloud provider.

2020 is certainly going to be an exciting year and I very much look forward to continued partnership with the amazing team at DigitalOcean!

Reaching 9,000 YouTube Subscribers

My channel has gained a massive 5,000 subscribers over the course of 2019 and has achieved a huge 439,200 views of all my videos. These numbers are fantastic and I’m hoping to continue building this momentum and doubling these subscriber numbers this year with a huge number of new videos planned for the channel.

I’ve actively started trying to respond to every and all comments left on my videos and trying to help people out as best I can. The aim this year will be to continue this ongoing engagement and try to achieve a greater number of responses and valuable conversations with people who want my help!

Detailed Stats

• Views - 439.2k - This is up 104% over the previous year!

• Watch Time(hours) - 23.5k - This is up 127% over the previous year!

• Subscribers - +5.0k - This is up 46% over the previous year!

• Revenue - Revenue went up a massive 277% over the previous year!

Site Traffic Stats

This year I have hit some fairly significant milestones in terms of traffic to the site and this is a trend that I’m very much hoping continues into 2020!

Overall, looking at Google Analytics, every stat has improved across the site and I’m confident this has something to do with the new design of the site and with the iterative improvements I have been making to the content already on the site!

Detailed Stats

• Users - 854k - The number of users hitting my site has gone up a massive 61% over 2018’s stats. The aim for 2020 will be to crack 1.5m users on the site!

• Page Views - 1.6m - TutorialEdge has served an absolutely incredible 1.6 million page views over the course of 2019 which is up 71.61% over the previous year, this is growth that I’m very much hoping I can continue!

• Pages/Session - 1.29 - A marginal increase of 2.18% over the previous year, this will be one of the most challenging stats to improve in the coming year, but I’m hoping that with new challenges and a new user system that this number will ultimately go up!

Launch of Programming Challenges

In 2019, I have been trying to come up with new ways of teaching programming to people with the help of a few friends and one of the methods we found most helpful was through programming challenges.

These challenges help to teach basic programming concepts whilst making the person who completes the challenge feel accomplished. Having trialed this approach in person with a fairly large number of people and seeing a good amount of success, I started working on a series of programming challenges for Go that would introduce new concepts and build on previous challenges.

In 2019 I released the beta version of challenges for Go and whilst I have had some success with it already, I am still iteratively improving this approach and hopefully make this an incredibly valuable learning resource for all newcomers to the language.

Future Plans

In 2020 I’m hoping to increase the number of Go challenges on the site and ensure that most, if not all basic concepts of the language have been covered in challenge format. I will be looking at ways I can improve this approach and, should these be successful, roll out new challenges for other programming languages such as Rust.

New Project Added to the Site

Building projects from the ground up is a hugely rewarding task that teaches you more than a single tutorial or article could. It gives you visibility into everything that is required to build complex projects and gives you the understanding necessary to go off and build your own projects and applications!

This year brought about the creation of this course:

• Chat System in Go and React - This project teaches you how you can build a really cool real-time chat system using both Go for the backend and React.js for the frontend!

In the Works

In 2020, I have a number of new projects that I plan to add ot the site including:

• The Imgur Clone in Vue.js and Node.js - This is currently under construction and parts 1,2, and 3 are available!

• Building a Cloud Native Application in Go - This project will teach you the fundamentals of building cloud native applications in Go. We’ll be looking at how you can build our a simple REST API that features everything a production quality Go app would need and then deploying that to DigitalOcean on top of a Kubernetes cluster.

• Website Analysis with Serverless - This project will look at how you can build a cool Website Analysis tool using AWS Lambdas functions as a backend and React.js for the frontend!

Goals for 2020

Moving into 2020, I have a number of huge things planned for the site!

• More Articles - I’ll be looking to put out at least an article a week for the next year and ensure that existing articles are brought up to date with current frameworks and versions!

• More YouTube Videos - This will be a huge year for video tutorials. The plan is to help as many people as possible and make the push for 20k YouTube subscribers this year!

• TutorialEdge accounts - I will be adding the ability to register for an account on TutorialEdge so that you can keep track of what challenges you have completed and your course progress!

Bringing in new Authors

So far, it has just been myself working on the site and adding new content, however with the sponsorship from DigitalOcean and the increased revenue from our advertisers and from YouTube, I’m hoping to start paying other people to contribute to the site and start competing seriously with some major sites like Scotch.io and Egghead.io.

New authors also means an improved range of content on the site. The world of software engineering is so vast that is impossible for one person to learn and to write about. However, bringing in more people with a wider degree of experience will certainly help to address this!

Closing Remarks

Once again, thank you so much to everyone who has helped or supported the site in some capacity. I absolutely love working on small projects and building up educational resources that ultimately help the entire programming community.

Based on the stats, I’m getting a lot closer to achieving my goal of the site being able to sustain me working on it full time!