One year ago, I registered the domain paulvanderlaken.com with three reasons in mind: (1) I wanted an online environment to store and showcase my pet projects, (2) to share and promote some of the great blogs and research others had been writing, and (3) to show others what I was doing on my path to “data science“. The year has been just amazing. I could not have imagined the amount of positive sentiment I received from friends, family, acquaintances, and old classmates. But, most of all, the nice reactions from complete strangers across the globe! Thank you all so much for the positive response.

To my surprise, some of my stuff actually got read!

• In August, I shared my Harry Plotter project and the first blog was read by 5,000 people. The second by another 3,000.
• My lists of programming resources also got some traction: 5,672 people looked at my list of R materials, 976 followed my guide to leaRning R, and 670 examined data science courses and books. In contrast, only a couple of hundreds may have been disappointed by my lacking lists of Python and SQL resources and practice datasets.
• Regarding data science, particularly my analysis of the 2017 Kaggle survey was viewed often, nearly 8,000 times in two months. Another 850 people saw my recent attempt at explaining data science visually.
• I nerdified chRistmas: 1,562 people heard R play Jingle Bells and 911 watched the animated snow fall.
• Machine learning is still booming and Google routed thousands of viewers to my blogs on deep learning with Keras and gradient boosting.
• Text analytics / mining is one of my personal favorite topics, so I wrote about mining Twitter and mining Trump’s Twitter, clustering news articles, heavy metal lyrics, Facebook sentiment, Stranger Things scripts, and many more.
• Several thousand viewers specifically came for Human Resource Management topics, like HR examples of Simpson’s paradox, job-switching behaviors, application success, application robots, and job mapping.

Some random stats:

In one year, I wrote 103 blogs which got over 42,000 views by nearly 30,000 visitors. 97.5% of these views occurred in the last six months. Most referrals came via Google (45%), reddit (18%), LinkedIn (8%), Facebook (8%), and Twitter (4%), and my blogs were shared a total of 241 times. Now, 51 people follow my blog, which is best viewed on Tuesdays (31%) and around 15:00h CET (6%).

Although my personal learning is still the main reason I maintain this blog, I am very glad people seem to enjoy tagging along. Hopefully, I can continue to discover and write about data (analysis) during the coming 12 months. For now, I’d want to thank my readers for their continued interest and, in particular, my girlfriend for coping with the numerous evenings and weekend I have wasted on my pet projects. Nonetheless, it was definitely worth the effort!

Hope to see you again soon,

Paul

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