Celebrating 4096 Subscribers and Happy Holidays

Happy New Year!

I’m very careful about the number of emails that I send out to you because I understand the value of time and attention. Just couple of days back, I released more than an hours worth of video on CPython type system internals and here I’m again. So I apologize in advance for the intrusion :)

However, the year is ending and I wanted to wrap it up with a few details about how things have gone at Confessions of a Code Addict, and also share some future plans!

I have been working continuously for last eight months, producing 32 pieces. As this is the holiday season around the world, I am planning to take a short break of about 10-14 days to recharge myself.

Reviewing 2023

I didn’t have a great start to 2023, the start-up where I was working at ran out of funds and I was left without a job. I started Confessions of a Code Addict at this point as a full-time and independent endeavor to not only share my passion for coding but also forge my own path, leveraging my skills and experiences in the tech world to build something meaningful and impactful.

The first post went out to zero people. But slowly and steadily it has grown from 0 to 4100 readers in last eight months. I am very grateful to each of you who has joined me in this journey.

Even though this graph shows 11 paid subscribers, there are really 7. Two subscribers are comped with a paid sub, while I have two test paid subscriptions to test payments.

I have produced 32 pieces in these last eight months, which have been read or viewed 100,000+ times in this time. Each of these pieces took me several days of research and then similar amount of time to write. I wouldn’t have been able to continue to do this without such a massive amount of encouragement from all of you, thank you for that.

Top Articles of 2023

These are the top articles from this year in descending order of their popularity:

• What Every Developer Should Know About GPU Computing

• How Many Lines of C it Takes to Execute a + b in Python?

• A Linear Algebra Trick for Computing Fibonacci Numbers Fast

• How CPython Implements and Uses Bloom Filters for String Processing

• Understanding Immortal Objects in Python 3.12: A Deep Dive into Python Internals

• A Tutorial Guide to Using The Function Call Feature of OpenAI's ChatGPT API

• Decoding the ACL Paper: Gzip and KNN Rival BERT in Text Classification

Looking Forward to 2024

So what’s in the store for the next year?

• More in-depth articles/videos: I will continue to write more of these in depth articles. I am going to focus more on covering programming languages internals, database internals, data structures, and machine learning.

• Discord server: I will launch a Discord server for us to hangout and have more informal and frequent conversations. I’ve to figure out the logistics before that.

• Live courses: Even though I write very detailed articles, it is not possible to cover everything that I want to in a few articles. I plan to do live courses in 2024 on topics like CPython internals, and machine learning. I will have some announcements in the new year about it. If you are an existing paid subscriber, you will get priority and discounts.

What Do You Want to Learn More About?

Although I write about topics that I think would be valuable to you, I would like to know your feedback about the kind of things you want to see more. For that I have a short survey of four objective questions which should not take more than a minute of your time. You can fill it up at this link:

Happy New Year!

And with that I will wrap this post up. I hope your holidays are great and your new year is even better. As I said, I am taking a 10 day break starting today, so till then have fun and don’t forget to fill the survey. Happy new year!