This is a monthly series reporting on how things are going at Console. This post looks at what happened in December.

Focus for December

I wrote last month:

Our main focus in Dec will be finalizing the production of Season 2 of the podcast ready for the first episode to drop on 6 Jan. There's a lot that goes into preparing for the release - audio editing, transcripts, show notes, promo graphics, clips for social media, creating a YouTube version and coordinating everything with the guests.

In the final two weeks of the year, we're also going to change the newsletter format to run a countdown of the top 10 tools of the year. The ranking will be based on which tools received the most clicks across the whole year, adjusted for the recipient numbers for each newsletter. This means the ranking is effectively chosen by our subscribers.

So how did we do?

Podcast Season 2

The first episode of season 2 was released last week with an interview with Cloudflare's CTO, John Graham-Cumming. We have a whole season of interviews - 11 in total - with interesting people building devtools.

The list of episodes is:

• Dev infrastructure, with John Graham-Cumming (Cloudflare)
• Security, with Thomas Ptacek (Fly.io)
• Observability, with Charity Majors (Honeycomb)
• Decentralization, with Brooklyn Zelenka (Fission)
• Devtools investing, with Ed Sim (Boldstart)
• Homomorphic Encryption, with Rand Hindi (Zama)
• Dev communities, with Rosie Sherry (Orbit)
• Web standards & privacy, with Desigan (Dees) Chinniah (Tor / Ex-Mozilla)
• Designing dev products, with Ellen Chisa (Boldstart)
• Terminal tools, with Michelle Lim & Zach Lloyd (Warp)
• Developer experience, with Jean Yang (Akita)

Top 10 Devtools of 2021

To wrap up the year, and give us 2 weeks off building the newsletter, we ran a countdown of the top 10 devtools revealing 5 in each email. These were selected based on the number of clicks against the number of email recipients throughout 2021.

These emails had some of the best engagement stats of the year, with all tools receiving over 1,200 unique clicks and some hitting almost 2,000. We also ran the countdown on Twitter.

Focus for January

We launched Console in January 2021 so this month marks our first birthday!

We'll be reviewing our website to make a range of small tweaks to improve the UX, such as the new footer design that went out just before the end of 2021. This will include rethinking the Tools section which has now hit the limits of just listing all tool reviews  - we have too many!

There's also a new section of the newsletter - DevTools jobs. This highlights 3 companies hiring in the devtools space, and we have created a set of selection criteria just for those. The idea is to highlight interesting companies to work for rather than specific jobs.