February Retrospective: The Shape of Year Two So Far

Two months into year two of daily technical writing and the shape of the year is emerging. It is deeper, narrower, and better than year one on almost every dimension I track. Here is the retrospective after fifty-nine consecutive articles in 2026.

The Numbers

• Articles published this year: 59 (Jan 1 to Feb 28)
• Average word count: just over 500
• Categories represented: all 14
• Inbound lead references to articles: up about 3x from year one
• Search traffic growth: roughly linear, no viral spikes

The linear growth is the point. Nothing viral. Just steady accumulation.

What Depth Is Producing

The year-two commitment to depth over breadth is showing up in rankings. Claude Code articles are ranking for long-tail queries in under a month. Agentic development articles are appearing in agent-tooling search results. The depth categories are outpacing the breadth categories on every metric.

What Is Not Working

• WordPress and SEO articles get fewer readers per article than other categories
• Content Systems articles get fewer inbound leads despite decent traffic
• DevOps articles convert poorly to consulting calls

Not every category pulls its weight equally. The data is starting to inform which categories get fewer slots in year two.

The Voice Shift

Year one voice was explanatory. Year two voice is opinionated. The articles that moved the business are the ones that took a position other consultants would not. The middle-of-the-road articles are technically correct and strategically useless.

The Habit Reality

Writing fifteen minutes a morning is still the bottleneck habit. Missing a day is easy to recover from. Missing three days is hard. Missing a week requires a deliberate reboot. Year two I have missed two single days and zero multi-day gaps.

The Tooling Stack

• Article drafts: Apple Notes or iPad
• Refinement: Claude Code on my laptop
• Publishing: Python urllib artifact scripts (see this month's batch)
• Scheduling: backdated publishedAt fields
• Review: reading my own feed weekly

Everything is boring on purpose. Boring tooling survives year two.

The Forward Look

March through June I will push harder into depth on three categories: Agentic Development, AI Supercharger, and Consulting. The plan is three to four articles per week in those categories, with the other categories rotating through the remaining slots.

The Year Two Thesis

The thesis holds. Depth over breadth, opinionated over explanatory, compounding over viral. Two months of data is not conclusive but the directional signal is clear.

What I Tell Other Writers

Do a retrospective every two months. Not every week (too noisy), not every year (too slow). Two months is long enough to see trends and short enough to correct course.

For a public example of this cadence see Matt Rickard's monthly-ish retrospectives which I still read.