In my day job I'm mainly working with SAP's programming language ABAP, which is something I really enjoy. The language has had quite the evolution and is adding new features with every SAP release. On that sense it's a journey of constant learning and improvement in handling the language.
This is why I decided to start a small side project called abap.tips. It's a small collection of tips and tricks for ABAP developers. The idea is that you can find a small snippet of code that you can use in your daily work.
I've started the site on 28.08.2019, which is exactly four years ago, so figured it would be a good time to reflect on the project.
Change hurts
In 2019 I started with a site generated by hugo static site generator. I feel no shame admitting that it was my first SSR site and I had no idea what I was doing. I just wanted to get something out there and hugo seemed like a good fit. I took a theme and started writing.
I started the site with my usual no-analytics approach, which is why I can't really tell how many people visited the site in the beginning. But in 2022 I added it to Google Search Console, which is a good way to get some insights into the traffic, without hurting user privacy, since it only uses the data from the search engine.
Sadly Google Search Console is deleting old numbers, which is why I can't share the exact numbers, but I remember it was getting around 100 visitors a day, excluding the weekends. But now, here comes the lesson I learned:
In 2021 I switched the framework first to Docsify and then to vitepress. This was a rather large technical switch, but the content stayed the same.
I was hoping that the new framework would help me with the SEO, but it didn't. In fact, it hurt the SEO quite a bit.
The problem was that the URL format changed from /en/basics/datatypes.html to /en/basics/datatypes and that seemingly confused Google deeply.
From the point of the switch I would only get around 3 visitors a day.
Finding the reason to keep going
So of course I was a bit disappointed by the drop in traffic, since it's always a great feeling to have a project that impacts people. I could have stopped there, but I didn't and the reason is simple: I was my own best customer.
I was using the site myself to look up things I had forgotten or to find a quick solution to a problem I was facing. It encouraged me to seek out these snippets in my own work and to abstract them to a degree that I could use later.
In total the site must have saved me hours of work, which is why I can only encourage you to start a site like this yourself. You might think that you can just google any problem you, but in my oppinion it's an even better feeling when you can look it up on a trusted source.
And so this concludes my reflection: Build something that you would use yourself and you will find the motivation to keep going, even if the numbers don't look that great. ;)