Matt's Tidbits #53 - First year in review
Tags: mattstidbits, tidbittuesday
Published: 2020-01-28 14:41:33

[Last week I wrote about code formatting etiquette.](https://medium.com/@matthew.b.groves/matts-tidbits-52-formatting-etiquette-f26e7c50e6f9)

🎉 This post marks the end of the first year of Matt’s Tidbits (and the start of the 2nd), so I wanted to have a little fun and look back at the past year. 🎉

- # of posts: 52
- # of “reads”: 1268
- Most read tidbit (179 reads!): [#19 — How to mock Kotlin singletons without using PowerMock](https://medium.com/@matthew.b.groves/matts-tidbits-29-how-to-mock-kotlin-singletons-without-using-powermock-938da069fa88)
- Tidbit applauded by highest number of readers (6): [#2 — Sometimes there’s a bug in the tool](https://medium.com/@matthew.b.groves/matts-tidbits-2-aa72d3d938ad)
- Least read tidbit (1 read): [#48 — Separating out search results for test code](https://medium.com/@matthew.b.groves/matts-tidbits-48-separating-out-search-results-for-test-code-d11190ab4847)

In the past year, I wrote about the following topics (# of occurrences):
- Android (47)
- Kotlin (15)
- Android Studio (14)
- Testing (11)
- Debugging, RxJava, JSON (3)
- Git (2)
- Espresso, Java, Lint, PowerMock, Android Data Binding, Mockito, Gradle, Conferences, Wi-Fi, JaCoCo, Jenkins, Jackson (1)

Stats are great and all, but they’re not the reason why I write. My primary motivation is helping people. Over the past year, I have had countless experiences where people have told me how excited they have been after reading one of my Tidbits, or told me after the fact that they learned something or that it helped them in some way.

Recently, a coworker asked me about a problem he was facing, because it sounded like something they had remembered reading about. I dug through my archive and found [Tidbit #42](https://medium.com/@matthew.b.groves/matts-tidbits-42-the-answer-to-the-ultimate-question-of-life-the-universe-and-everything-or-ec851fe6afce) — and it immediately answered their question and saved them a significant chunk of time trying to figure this out on their own. That’s really the spirit of this — I write to share my experiences in the hopes that it will help others.

This is my philosophy on writing — yes, you can be the foremost technical expert on a particular topic and tell people exactly how they should do something. There is great value in that type of material — I frequently read these when trying to figure out how to do something. However, I also see a lot of value in sharing your experience with a particular problem/technology/situation and pointing out what worked, what didn’t, and hopefully, someone out there learns something from that. I find it happens in the most unexpected ways sometimes too — someone once read one of my tidbits ([#11](https://medium.com/@matthew.b.groves/matts-tidbits-11-with-great-power-comes-great-responsibility-a-mockwebserver-story-54314f4242e)) and was really inspired to bite the bullet and start writing automated tests for their code. I didn’t give them all the answers (they were using Bluetooth instead of traditional networking), but they picked up on the spirit of my post and ran with it.

So, if you’re on the fence about whether you should start writing (and what you should write about), I say pick anything that is meaningful to you and jump on in! The water’s fine. :-)

Thanks to everyone who has read my posts and helped me on this journey over the past year. It takes a lot of work to put these together every week, but looking back I can say it has been absolutely worth it. Do you have any requests of things you’d like me to write about next? Let me know in the comments below!

And, please follow me on Medium if you’re interested in being notified of future tidbits.

Interested in joining the awesome team here at Intrepid? [We’re hiring!](https://www.intrepid.io/careers)